Colorado Bullying Victim Representation
The Lento Law Firm's premier Education Law Team is available in Denver, Colorado Springs, Aurora, Fort Collins, Lakewood, Thornton, Arvada, Westminster, Pueblo, Greeley, Centennial, Boulder, Highlands Ranch, Longmont, and across Colorado to help your student win a monetary recovery for bullying harm. Our skilled and experienced attorneys can provide the knowledgeable and trustworthy representation your student needs. Call 888.535.3686 now or use our contact form to tell us about your student's Colorado school bullying case.
Colorado Bullying Victim Representation
Pursuing and prevailing in a civil court case to recover money damages against Colorado public grade school officials is not an easy or routine matter. Local criminal defense attorneys and civil litigators may well lack the special experience to properly exhaust administrative procedures, identify the best federal or state laws under which to proceed, and choose the best state or federal litigation forum. Our premier Education Law Team can provide your student with the special services your student needs for the best chance at a monetary recovery. If your student has suffered bullying injuries, whether physical, mental, emotional, social, academic, or reputational, your student deserves the best available representation.
Serious Bullying Impacts, Injuries, and Harms
Don't underestimate bullying's impact on your Colorado grade school student. Bullying can cause serious bullying injuries, impacts, and harm. You may not have experienced bullying as a student, or your experience may not have approached the bullying that students face today. Don't just expect your student to tough it out. Bullying can include or lead to rape or other sexual assault, stabbings, beatings, shootings, sexting and sexual blackmail, and other horrifying wrongs. Student victims have attempted and committed suicide, suffered severe depression, withdrawn from school, been expelled from school, or failed school, and suffered long-term mental, emotional, physical, academic, and social harm. Treat bullying with the seriousness that it deserves. Protect your student. Contact us to represent your student to stop bullying and make a monetary recovery.
Money Recoveries in Bullying Cases
Bullying is something schools must stop under state laws. When school officials don't stop bullying and instead gloss over it, ignore it, or even ratify it, courts in Colorado and nationwide have allowed monetary recoveries. You may be able to set aside a substantial sum of money for your student's care, recovery, and future to make up for bullying injuries, impacts, and harm. But if so, your student's recovery will not be for the bullying itself, perpetrated in all likelihood by other students. Your student's recovery will instead be for the school's deliberate indifference to bullying, which it knew and that it failed to prevent.
Cases allowing money damages against public schools for bullying injuries have involved alleged sexual assaults, sexual harassment, physical assaults with hand, foot, or weapon, racial slurs, taunting, ridiculing, invasions of privacy, and other serious harms. Monetary awards have climbed as high as five, six, or even seven figures, topping $1,000,000 in the more extraordinary cases. But those recoveries take considerable skill, timing, strategy, resources, and effort. Litigation of this type is not for the inexperienced, unqualified, or faint of heart. Retain the Lento Law Firm's Education Law Team for the legal representation your student needs.
Bullying Is More than a State Problem
Bullying isn't just a Colorado issue. Bullying isn't just a state or local problem. Leading school advocacy organizations and policymakers like the National Association of School Nurses call bullying a nationwide problem. According to one research site, bullying is most prevalent in California but also presents in a high incidence in states in the Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, and Southwest. Colorado ranks only 37th among the fifty states in the frequency of bullying in its public schools but still reports many such incidents. Bullying is a national problem about which educators are or should be well aware, including in Colorado.
Bullying in Colorado Grade Schools
Federal statistics for Colorado public schools show that nearly two-thirds of ages twelve to seventeen report having been bullied in the past thirty days. The same data shows that more than eighty percent of students report having been bullied at least once during their school years. Cyberbullying has reached about half of all students, including more than a quarter of all students, in the past thirty days. Nearly forty percent of students admit to bullying other students, while about a quarter of students acknowledge receiving sexting, and a fifth of students admit to sending sexting. Your student is not alone when having suffered school bullying. Retain us to help your student take the kind of concerted legal action that may help bring a halt to bullying.
Colorado Anti-Bullying Laws
The Colorado legislature, like other state legislatures, has enacted clear laws outlawing bullying in the state's public schools. Colorado Statutes Section 22-32-109.1(1)(b) provides that “bullying is prohibited against any student for any reason, including but not limited to any such behavior that is directed toward a student on the basis of his or her academic performance….” The same statute requires each school board to adopt a mission statement and school safety plan to prevent bullying and other harassing and disruptive behaviors. Schools must also adopt and enforce a student discipline code to enforce “uniformly, fairly, and consistently for all students.” Schools must also train students and teachers in anti-bullying measures while providing a complaint process to facilitate discipline for bullying and other disruptive behavior. Schools also have reporting requirements. Colorado law certainly requires schools to prevent and punish bullying.
Colorado's Bullying Definition
Colorado Statutes Section 22-32-109.1 defines bullying as “any written or verbal expression, or physical or electronic act or gesture, or a pattern thereof, that is intended to coerce, intimidate, or cause any physical, mental, or emotional harm to any student.” The statute excepts from its bullying definition “expression of any religious, political, or philosophical views.” But the same statute includes provisions for protecting students against “disruptive” students and removing students who are “habitually disruptive.” Colorado's broad bullying definition reaches many forms of conduct. Examples of misconduct that Colorado's broad bullying definition should encompass include:
- physical assault such as hitting, kicking, slapping, pulling hair, shoving, tripping, beating, stabbing, and shooting, and threats of physical assault;
- sexual assault including rape or sexual touching, indecent exposure, sexting, displays of pornographic materials, sexting, sexual blackmail, threats of sexual assault, and sexual harassment of the hostile environment form;
- teasing, taunting, mocking, parodying, ridiculing, intimidating, oppressing, annoying, frustrating, and other public embarrassment including invasions of privacy;
- theft, damage, or destruction of clothing, jewelry, glasses, and other personal effects, laptop computers, tablets, cell phones, and other electronic devices, and other personal property; and
- disrupting by other means a student victim's participation in school studies, school activities, or school social relationships through hostile, intimidating, or abusive acts.
Colorado's Bullying Definition Expressly Includes Discrimination
Colorado school discipline laws expressly include provisions prohibiting bullying based on a student victim's protected characteristics. The bullying definition in Colorado Statutes Section 22-32-109.1 prohibits bullying based on any characteristic protected by federal or state anti-discrimination laws. Colorado Statute Section 22-32-109(kk)(II)(I) adds that schools “are subject to all federal and state laws and constitutional provisions prohibiting discrimination on the basis of disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, ancestry, or need for special education services.” The same statute provides that race “includes hair texture, hair type, or a protective hairstyle that is commonly or historically associated with race.”
Bullies often pick on a student victim's personal characteristics. The above anti-discrimination provisions reinforce that schools must especially prohibit bullying that picks on characteristics federal and state anti-discrimination laws protect. Discriminatory bullying can increase the impact and worsen the harm.
Colorado's Bullying Definition Includes Cyberbullying
Colorado Statutes Section 22-32-109.1 includes cyberbullying, meaning bullying through electronic communications, within its broad prohibitions. The statute requires schools to adopt an internet safety plan that recognizes, prevents, and punishes online forms of bullying. Parents unfamiliar with the ubiquitous use and substantial impact of social media and other electronic communications among grade-school students may minimize and look askance at cyberbullying allegations. But cyberbullying, in its worst cases, can be severely intimidating and oppressive.
Colorado Civil Liability Compensating Bullying Victims
Students interested in suing their school and its officials under Colorado state law for bullying harm must first overcome immunity. Immunity means no suing for monetary recovery. A provision of Colorado's anti-bullying law, Colorado Statutes Section 22-32-109.1(9), grants limited immunity to schools and their employees and officials who implement in good faith the statute's anti-bullying measures. The statute provides that anyone “acting in good faith” in carrying out the law “shall be immune from criminal prosecution or civil liability for such actions….” The same statute provides an exception, permitting a civil lawsuit when “a teacher or any other person act[s] willfully or wantonly in violation of” the anti-bullying law's enforcement measures. Our Education Law Team can help you evaluate whether school officials acted willfully or wantonly, giving your student a state law cause of action.
Colorado Sovereign Immunity Law and Bullying Claimants
The anti-bullying statute's immunity provision is not the only hurdle your student must clear in order to maintain a civil lawsuit under Colorado state law. Colorado also has a Governmental Immunity Act beginning at Colorado Statutes Section 24-10-101. The act's Section 24-10-106 preserves sovereign immunity, meaning no civil lawsuits against government or government officials unless the act grants a special exception. The act permits a local body like a school district to waive its sovereign immunity, meaning it would permit civil lawsuits. Few, if any, school districts would do so. You and your student must thus likely contend with the state's Governmental Immunity Act.
Waivers of Colorado Sovereign Immunity Law for Bullying Claimants
Fortunately, the act's Section 24-10-105, like the above anti-bullying statute, permits lawsuits under state tort law for willful and wanton misconduct. The act's Section 24-10-106.1, titled the Claire Davis School Safety Act, repeats the same waiver of sovereign immunity for willful and wanton acts on school grounds. The same statute separately waives sovereign immunity for any acts, not just willful and wanton acts, that involve a first-degree assault or sexual assault that causes serious bodily injury, meaning a substantial risk of death, permanent serious disfigurement, or impairment of body function. Only the school, not the school's teachers or other officials, are liable under this section. You and your student thus have at least two potential theories to explore for civil liability under Colorado state tort law.
Colorado Tort Law Compensating Bullying Victims
You and your student must still articulate a tort law claim. The above statutes on immunity and waivers of immunity do not create a civil cause of action. They only permit the action if it meets the statutes' terms for suing school officials. The usual Colorado tort claim would be one for negligence, meaning carelessness in the duty to reasonably prevent bullying. Negligence claims are often not hard to plead and prove. But if your student's claim does not fit the above crime of violence / serious bodily injury exception, your student would also have to prove willful and wanton acts, which would involve a significantly higher standard. Your student may also have Colorado tort claims for defamation, invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, or even assault and battery if school officials committed the bullying or encouraged and ratified it.
Colorado State Law Claims Against the Bully
The above discussion assumes that the school and its officials are the defendants. Public schools generally have the financial assets and liability insurance to pay for damages in bullying and other tort cases. Public schools may also indemnify (pay the judgment against) school officials, depending on the nature of the officials' misconduct. Schools, though, do not generally pay for the liability of the bully. A minor student who bullies another student would have no immunity. Getting a money judgment against the bully may be relatively easy. However, minor students who bully do not generally have income or assets to pay a monetary judgment, and insurance does not generally cover intentional wrongs like bullying. Your student's only meaningful recourse is likely to be against the school and its officials, not the bully.
Federal Laws Compensating for Bullying Harm
Federal law may provide an alternative route for monetary recovery, whether or not Colorado state law grants your student a recovery right. Federal law, though, can be quite complex, much more so than the above Colorado tort laws and laws on governmental immunity. Federal claims for bullying are also generally litigated in the federal courts, where the procedures, customs, and conventions differ from state court proceedings. Local criminal defense attorneys and civil litigators may not have the necessary skills, experience, and resources to effectively litigate a bullying claim in federal court. Retain our premier Education Law Team to do so.
Section 1983 Substantive Due Process Claims
A peculiar federal law from the post-Civil War era, known as Section 1983, may be your student's preferred legal basis for a money damages recovery for bullying harm. Section 1983 authorizes damages claims against government officials and agencies when acting under the color of state law to deny the claimant's constitutional or federal statutory rights. Federal courts have upheld jury verdicts and settlements in bullying cases, meeting those requirements in Colorado and many other states. A Section 1983 claim generally requires evidence that school officials were aware of the bullying but deliberately indifferent that it violated your student's known constitutional or federal statutory rights. Related recovery theories include a special duty and relationship, Soper v. Hoben, 195 F.3d 845, 852 (6th Cir. 1999), state-created danger, Jones v. Reynolds, 438 F.3d 685, 690 (6th Cir. 2006), and shocks the conscience test, Range v. Douglas, 763 F.3d 573, 588 (6th Cir. 2014). Let our attorneys help you and your student investigate and pursue a Section 1983 claim for your student's bullying injuries.
Federal Anti-Discrimination Laws for Bullying Compensation
Federal anti-discrimination laws may provide another route for a federal law recovery for bullying harm, especially if the bully targeted your student's protected characteristics and school officials were deliberately indifferent that the targeting was denying your student access to educational services. Federal anti-discrimination laws supporting a civil cause of action for money damages under these circumstances may include:
- Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, protecting against disability discrimination;
- Title IV or Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects against discrimination based on race, color, national origin, and religion; and
- Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 protects against discrimination based on sex.
Damages Categories for Colorado Bullying Victims
The above federal and state laws only determine whether your student has a civil claim for monetary damages for bullying harm. The above laws do not clearly state how much in damages your student may recover. Colorado's state law of damages determines the amount of money your student may recover. Colorado's damages law, like the damages laws of other states, provides for the recovery of both economic damages and non-economic damages. Both types of damages involve money recovery.
Economic Damages for Colorado Public School Bullying Harm
Economic damages address your out-of-pocket expenses, if any, that the bullying caused. Bullying may cause physical injuries requiring medical treatment and even hospitalization. Bullying may also cause mental and emotional injuries requiring counseling and medication. Those medical expenses are recoverable economic damages. Your student may have missed work and lost income from the bullying, which would also be economic damage. If the bully stole, damaged, or destroyed personal property, repair or replacement of that property would be another recoverable economic loss.
Non-Economic Damages for Colorado Public School Bullying Harm
Whether or not your student suffered any economic loss, your student likely suffered at least some non-economic damage, and perhaps substantial non-economic damage, from the bullying. Non-economic damages compensate for pain and suffering from physical harm, mental and emotional distress from embarrassment and ridiculing, and fear and fright from the bully's threats, as well as lost enjoyment of life from the depression and withdrawal that bullying causes. Non-economic damages, though hard to measure precisely, may be a multiple of economic loss, warranting the large awards you sometimes see in these cases.
Punitive Damages for Colorado Public School Bullying Harm
Colorado is among the states that permit an award of punitive damages to punish the defendant, in addition to the above compensatory damages to make the plaintiff whole. Colorado Statutes Section 13-21-102 authorizes punitive damages, or what the state calls exemplary damages, when the defendant has acted with malice or willfully and wantonly. The statute defines willful and wanton conduct to mean “conduct purposefully committed which the actor must have realized as dangerous, done heedlessly and recklessly, without regard to consequences, or of the rights and safety of others, particularly the plaintiff.” Punitive damages can be a multiple of compensatory damages, substantially increasing an award. Let us help you evaluate and prove your student's recoverable damages.
Defending Disciplinary Charges Against Bullying Victims
Our premier Education Law Team is also available to defend disciplinary charges against your student, even though your student is the bullying victim. Bullying victims must sometimes act in self-defense in ways that school officials may misconstrue as affirmative wrongs. Bullying victims also sometimes act out, skip classes, refuse to complete assignments, or engage in other seemingly disruptive behaviors to avoid the bully and further bullying harm. If the school accuses your student of misconduct of this type, we can step in to help defend your student against those unfair accusations.
Representation for Colorado Bullying Victims
The Lento Law Firm's premier Education Law Team is ready to represent your student in Denver, Colorado Springs, Aurora, Fort Collins, Lakewood, Thornton, Arvada, Westminster, Pueblo, Greeley, Centennial, Boulder, Highlands Ranch, Longmont, or any other location across Colorado. We have helped hundreds of students gain relief from bullying and address other serious conduct issues. Call 888.535.3686 now or use our contact form to tell us about your case. Let us help your Colorado grade school student recover money damages for bullying harm.
