SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Legal Newsline) - A California school district may be on the hook for a car crash that took the life of a 16-year-old student who got in a car with a friend after her bus was late, an appeals court ruled.
A law protecting school districts against lawsuits over injuries that occur off premises has an exception when a district “has undertaken to provide transportation” for students, California’s Third Appellate District Court ruled in a Sept. 18 decision. The appeals court interpreted the law to mean districts have a duty to provide safe and reliable bus service and can be on the hook for injuries when they fail to do so, overruling a trial court’s dismissal of the case.
George Brimsmead, the father of a student identified as G., sued Elk Grove Unified School district after his daughter was killed in a head-on collision on Jan. 22, 2020. The parents claimed the school district was liable because a bus scheduled for 6:30 a.m. didn’t arrive and after 40 minutes G. got a ride with a friend instead.
A trial court dismissed the case, citing Section 44808 of the state Education Code, which holds districts immune from liability “at any time when the pupil is not on school property.”
There is an exception for injuries involving transportation while a student “is or should be under the immediate and direct supervision of an employee.” Sacramento County Judge Richard Sueyoshi acknowledged the exception but ruled it didn’t apply because G. hadn’t gotten on the bus yet. The law couldn’t be read to cover “any busing actions …even before a student actually boards a school bus in the morning,” the judge ruled.
“We disagree,” the appeals court said. The district argued the law uses the term “specific undertaking,” meaning it doesn’t apply to the general idea of promising bus transportation.
“This argument is not compelling,” the appeals court ruled, however. “When a district accepts a student’s enrollment in a district’s school bus program to provide stable and reliable transportation to school, that acceptance constitutes a `specific undertaking’ by the district.”
As for “is or should be under immediate and direct supervision of an employee,” the court said, the parents successfully argued that applied in their case because G. should have been on the bus when her accident occurred. The court cited two other decisions where districts were found potentially liable for children who were hit by cars after getting off the bus.