Education Week - May 8, 2024 - 16

Oxford School Shooter's Parents Were Convicted.
Holding the District Liable Could Be Tougher
The guilty verdict for the parents in the Oxford, Mich., case expanded the scope of responsibility,
but it remains difficult to hold schools liable
By Mark Walsh
The recent criminal convictions of
the parents of the student who killed
four students at Oxford High School
in Michigan in 2021 were groundbreaking-the
first time for parents
of a mass school shooter. The convictions
have cast fresh light on efforts to
hold a variety of other parties legally
responsible for mass school shootings.
Jennifer and James Crumbley,
who were convicted of manslaughter
in separate trials earlier this year,
were each sentenced on April 9 to
10 to 15 years in prison. Their son,
Ethan Crumbley, who was a 15-yearold
sophomore at the time, pulled a
9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun
out of his backpack on Nov. 30,
2021, and began shooting, killing four
Oxford High students and wounding
seven others, including a teacher. The
parents were charged because they
obtained the gun for their son and
failed to respond to signs of his deteriorating
mental health, prosecutors
have said.
At the April 9 sentencing hearing
in a Pontiac, Mich., courtroom, the
father of one of the victims alluded to
efforts to hold other parties responsible
as well.
" This is the low hanging fruit, " said
William Myre, the father of 16-yearold
Tate Myre, who was killed. " Now
it's time to turn our attention to Oxford
schools, who played a role in this tragedy. "
Lawsuits
seeking to hold the
5,700-student Oxford Community
School District and several of its employees
partially liable for the 2021
incident are well along, with courts
already rejecting some claims while
allowing a few to proceed.
However, holding school districts
and personnel legally responsible for
school shootings remains exceedingly
challenging for many reasons, including
government immunity from state
lawsuits that protects districts and difficult
hurdles to win federal constitutional
claims.
" Historically, there has been fairly
limited instances of liability generally
arising out of school shootings, " said
Charles Vergon, a lecturer in education
and political science at the University
of Michigan-Flint, who has
studied the issue for years. " But there
have been some significant examples
recently. "
Notably, mass school shootings
have resulted in some major legal settlements
in recent years. Such settlements
often do not entail admissions
of liability, but they tend to come
about when defendants believe they
face adverse outcomes in court.
In the 2018 shooting that killed 17
students and school workers at Mar16
| EDUCATION WEEK | May 8, 2024 | www.edweek.org
Four roses are placed on a fence
outside Oxford High School in
Oxford, Mich., honor Hana St.
Juliana, 14, Madisyn Baldwin, 17,
Tate Myre, 16, and Justin Shilling,
17, the four teens killed in the Nov.
30, 2021, shooting at the school.
jory Stoneman Douglas High School
in Parkland, Fla., the FBI settled a suit
over its failure to follow through on a
phone tip for $127 million, while the
Broward County school board settled
lawsuits over its own actions for
$25 million. In 2022, Remington, the
maker of the rifle used by the shooter
who killed 20 in the 2012 shooting at
Sandy Hook Elementary School in
Newtown, Conn., settled a lawsuit
with victims' families for $73 million.
The Parkland case also saw other
forms of consequences, such as the
suspension of four Broward school
board members and the removal of the
Broward County sheriff by Florida's
governor, as well as the prosecution
of the Stoneman-Douglas High school
resource officer accused of failing to
confront the shooter, though he was
acquitted last year of state charges of
child neglect and culpable negligence.
" Even though we have those breakthroughs,
school districts and school
officials continue to escape liability in
the vast majority of cases, " said Vergon,
who is also an emeritus professor at
Youngstown State University in Ohio.
Difficult hurdles in state and
federal courts
The 1999 mass shooting at Columbine
High School in Littleton, Colo., in
which two 17-year-old students killed
12 students and one teacher, is illustrative
of the challenges of holding
districts and school officials liable for
conduct that may have contributed to
the tragedy.
Later investigations revealed that
a school resource officer and several
teachers or counselors had warning
signs of the perpetrators' dangerous
tendencies, including school video
projects by the pair depicting the use
of guns, violent themes in their writing
assignments and website content,
and statements the two made about
blowing up their school in the year before
the slayings.
A key argument in lawsuits brought
by family members of the slain and
injured victims against school defendants
was based on a " state-created
danger " theory of liability under
the due process clause of the 14th
Amendment. Such claims involve actions
by the government that expose
individuals to a special danger by a
third party.
But while a federal court that ruled
on numerous consolidated state and
federal claims found that school officials
had some knowledge of the risks
surrounding the two perpetrators, the
warning signs unfolded over more
than a year and were not " proximate "
to the attack.
The perpetrators' " actions on April
20, 1999, were the predominant, if not
sole, cause of plaintiffs' injuries, " the
judge said. Those lawsuits were settled
while the case was on appeal, with payments
from the district of just $15,000
to each family of the victims and without
any significant concessions of liability
from the school defendants.
In the Newtown, Conn., mass
shooting, the $73 million settlement
by Remington, after a series of court
rulings that would have allowed the
victims' families to pierce various liability
shields of the gun manufacturer,
was groundbreaking. But lawsuits
seeking to hold the school district liable
for, among other things, failing to
provide classroom doors that locked
from the inside, were rejected.
In the aftermath of the 2018 mass
shooting in Parkland, there were more
than 100 lawsuits filed against the
Broward County school district and its
employees, with some alleging negligence
for failing to act on troubling
incidents involving the perpetrator,
who was a 19-year-old former student
at the high school.
Families faced a state law that
capped liability at $300,000 per incident,
with a state court holding that
the entire mass shooting was a single
incident. In 2021, as the Florida legislature
considered bills that would
have allowed larger claims, the Broward
County school district negotiated
a settlement with victims' families
for $25 million.
One of the most recent mass school
shootings, the 2022 attack at Robb Elementary
School in Uvalde, Texas, in
which an 18-year-old shooter fatally
shot 19 students and two teachers, is
Jake May/The Flint Journal via AP

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Education Week - May 8, 2024

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