School flunks at caring for Child

A teacher’s failure to intervene in a verbal dispute between two Norman Manley High School (NMHS) students, before it turned physical and left one of them bloodied and missing a tooth, is a “clear breach of the duty and standard of care” the institution owed the injured child, the Supreme Court has ruled.

The January 12 ruling marked the end of a lawsuit filed by Tennisha Sullivan, the mother of Amani Dean Moss, an eighth-grade NMHS student at the time, who claimed that the 2017 attack by his classmate was over missing shoe polish and that it happened in a classroom in front of a substitute teacher.

Moss was struck in the mouth and lower jawbone, dislodging a tooth and loosening two others and will require future medical care, the lawsuit claimed of the March 27, 2017 incident.

He claimed that his attacker, identified in court documents as Roshawn Rattray, got upset after complaining that someone had taken his shoe polish.

The two were seated across from each other and facing the teacher, who was sitting around a desk at the front of the classroom when Rattray accused Moss of taking the shoe polish and launched the attack when Moss laughed before repeating his denial, the lawsuit alleged.

The incident was not disputed by the Attorney General’s Department, which represented the State.

Justice Sonya Wint-Blair, who presided over the case, awarded Sullivan $2.3 million in general damages, with annual interest of three per cent from January 30, 2019 to the date of her ruling, and $4,200 in special damages.

The lawsuit claimed that Moss’ injuries resulted from the school’s negligence for failing to provide proper supervision to ensure the safety of students, including him, and failing to exercise reasonable care for his safety while he was at NMHS’s Maxfield Avenue campus.

It also accused the school of failing to take any or all reasonable steps to ensure Moss’ safety and failing to put in place any proper safeguards to guarantee and preserve his safety.

However, in denying that the school was negligent, principal Roncell Brooks, who was a vice-principal in 2017, gave evidence that at the time of the incident several systems were in place to ensure student safety, and that students were “reasonably” supervised.

As part of those measures, he said all teachers are equipped with classroom management skills, including conflict resolution, as part of their training.

Brooks gave evidence that fighting is “rarely observed” at NMHS, but said whenever staff members notice a conflict between students, “they intervene before it escalates into a fight”.

However, Wint-Blair took issue with this evidence, noting that the alleged attack on Moss began with Rattray’s “burst out” – as described by the testimony of another student – over the missing shoe polish.

Further, she noted that there was no evidence that the teacher addressed this misbehaviour.

“The unchallenged evidence was that the argument lasted about 10 minutes. The teacher did not act to quell this disruption,” she said in her ruling.

“Roshawn rose from his seat and moved from his table. There was no action by the teacher. Roshawn moved toward the claimant [Moss] – still no action by the teacher. Roshawn inflicted the blow. There is no evidence that the teacher took any action,” the judge noted.

She described this “failure” by the teacher as a “glaring omission”, saying there was no effort to enforce the rules or to initiate disciplinary action.

“The teacher’s failure to take action to resolve what began as an outburst allowed it to escalate unchecked into an act of violence. The omission and inaction amounted to a failure to do what a reasonable schoolmaster would do in the circumstances of a teacher supervising a class in which there is disruptive behaviour,” said Wint-Blair.

“The teacher’s failure to intervene is a clear breach of the duty and the standard of care owed to the claimant.”

The NMHS principal admitted, during cross-examination, that he had no personal knowledge of the incident beyond what he was told and when or where it occurred, except what had been recorded.

Wint-Blair noted, however, that Brooks was unable to fill the “evidential gaps” regarding the time and place of the incident.

She indicated, too, that the records relied on by the NMHS principal “were neither named nor produced in evidence before the court, nor was it given in evidence as to how they came into being”.

livern.barrett@gleanerjm.com