TUSD damage payouts often related to buses: Star analysis shows injuries, property claims also listed; some criticize district's response

A kindergartner looking for bugs with his friends pried open an unbolted utility box cover to peer inside. The 70-pound cover dropped on the boy's hand, severing his index finger and leading to a $45,000 payout from the Tucson Unified School District.

A neighbor near Valencia Middle School wanted $3,700 to fix a dining room window shattered by a rock.

A neighborhood association sought $764 to replace uprooted vegetation after a school bus lost control and barreled into desert terrain.

These are among the 400 claims the Tucson Unified School District has faced in the past five years.

An Arizona Daily Star review of about 100 recent claims showed that many of them involve a few general patterns:

--Damage by buses: More than 50, or about half, of the claims stem from run-ins with buses or other district vehicles. Aside from full-blown collisions, buses slide into fences, clip parked cars, crush mailboxes and hit street signs. A fire hydrant and a gas meter also were among the casualties.

--Other property damage: An employee indiscriminately wielding a Weedeater broke windows or pitted paint on at least seven cars in the faculty parking lot at Steele Elementary School last October. In that one shift, the district racked up more than $2,000 in claims. In other cases, unsecured parking lot gates swung open to hit cars, or school crossing signs rolled into passing vehicles. In one instance, a teacher at Catalina High Magnet School sought $192 to replace two tires on her car. She said students slashed them in the school parking lot after she stood up for a student being bullied.

--Lost or stolen property: In a round of AIMS testing last school year, a Santa Rita High School teacher told students to put their cell phones and iPods in a basket, presumably to cut down on distractions or cheating opportunities. At the end of class, one student reported her $140 iPod missing. There were a dozen similar claims of confiscated communications equipment at other schools.

--Injuries: Among other cases, the district paid the medical costs when a Palo Verde High School student tripped over a sprinkler, requiring nine stitches. It also paid $35,515 to the parents of a Wright Elementary School student who was assaulted on the playground by a student with a history of behavioral problems. The 10-year-old ended up hospitalized for six days with a lacerated spleen.

And it paid $5,000 after a picnic table collapsed in January 2008, causing severe vaginal lacerations to a high school student sitting at the table. The case was settled in June and hinged on whether school officials knew of the risk and took appropriate action to head it off. The girl's attorneys said school officials knew students were removing screws from the table as a prank and suggested the staff could have used locking washers or welded the bolts on.

Some large payments

The district has been on the hook for some large payouts in recent years.

Last September, a jury told the district to pay $4.7 million to a teacher and her daughter after a bus driver with a history of accidents plowed into her car, leaving her with significant brain injuries. In 2006, it paid a $2.9 million settlement to a Tucson High Magnet School basketball star who was paralyzed on one side of his body after fans rushed the court at a championship game and tackled him.

Insurance picks up most of the costs on those big awards. Factor out those anomalies, though, and the district shells out on average about $300,000 in liability costs annually.

Jay Johnston, the district's chief operating officer, said he was impressed when he did his initial review of the risk management department's performance when he arrived in the district last December as a former corporate risk management executive.

Given 56,000 students and roughly 10,000 employees, including those working in higher-risk areas such as transportation and school safety, the district has held claims to what he considers relatively low numbers.

The consistency in both the number of claims and the payouts, he said, "suggests you're dealing with a relatively stable environment." The department also closes cases quickly, Johnston noted. Of the 61 claims filed last year, 51 already are closed. Even so, he said, the district is trying to reduce the number of claims.

Because school safety is an area of exposure, the district is cleaning up fire code violations, has plans to install cameras in schools with vandalism problems and is working at clamping down on the distribution of building keys. It also has reinstituted its restitution program.

If a student is convicted of criminal damage for breaking windows at school, for example, that student and his parent would have to help the district pay for the damage. In the past seven years, the district has collected $239,202 through the program.

With buses the district's single largest liability, there are now two quality-control staffers who watch for safety violations on the road and in school parking lots. Any trends they see will help steer safety training over the summer.

Aside from sidelining drivers for driving violations, Johnston said, they are also kept off the road if they fail agility tests or aren't up to par on cardiopulmonary resuscitation standards.

The district brought a driving simulator in for additional training when school was out over the summer.

Bus incidents

Joseph Haber filed a claim in January last year after a bus swung wide in his cul-de-sac and ran into his Dodge Intrepid in front of his house.

The car was totaled. The driver, who was new, apologized. But, he said, that was the end of the customer service.

"It was taken care of, but it was an absolute hassle," said Haber, who was paid $4,300 for the car. "The folks who came out to survey the accident were short and rude and tried to insinuate I shouldn't be parked on the street in front of my house." He had to go down to the district three times to get the paperwork in order, he said, adding, "Some of the people I dealt with weren't the most pleasant."

Lee Hop, a retired postal employee, filed a claim last November after one of his daughter's teachers told students to take their phones and iPods out of their backpacks and put them on a shelf. His daughter, then a junior, couldn't find her $386.97 unit after class.

"As long as she wasn't using it, I don't see why it's right to take property like that," Hop said. But beyond that, it steams him as a taxpayer that the property wasn't then secured.

"If they made the teacher responsible, and not the district, things might change, but seeing how it's not their money, it's not out of their pocket; it's just another lost iPod," he said.

Hop said that even though "I had to go through all this red tape to get it," he did get his money.

Not all claims have such a satisfying resolution.

Just after 9 p.m. on March 6, 2008, a bus crashed into the side of the J&M Corp., a motorcycle audio equipment dealer in a predominantly industrial area on South Cherry Avenue. The bus left bricks crumbling around a bus-sized indentation in the wall. The owners sought $115,000 in damages, including repairs to the outside of the building, as well as to the interior shelving and electrical work.

The owners, who were at a trade show in Daytona Beach, Fla., were forced to send an employee back to Tucson to handle the emergency and secure the building. The bus driver alleged that he had applied the parking brake, turned off the engine and went inside a post office across the street. After hearing a noise that sounded like a collision, he found the bus nose-first into the wall. He reported there was no one around, and the doors to the bus were still shut.

A technicality, however, meant no satisfaction for the company.

The Phoenix attorney hired by the company had called TUSD's legal department to ask to whom the claim should be addressed, since a claim must be filed within 180 days of the incident to protect the right to sue. The lawyer said he was told by a legal assistant that it was fine to send the notice to the president of the Governing Board. The letter went to then-Board President Alex Rodriguez and district staff attorneys.

Once the claim was filed, however, the district argued that the case should be thrown out because the plaintiffs were supposed to notify the entire Governing Board, as well as the bus driver. A judge agreed that the claim wasn't filed with the correct parties, and the case was dismissed.

"TUSD knew they did this. They knew they were at fault," said Melinda Carevich, one of the owners of the company, who said TUSD never called to apologize or explain. "They shouldn't have fought the claim. But this is a case where they have more money and bigger attorneys than I do. This is an example of the little guy being squeezed out by the bigger guy."

Carevich said as a result, her insurance had to cover the loss, which drove her rates up. She had to pay an electrician to come out in the middle of the night. She had to get a permit to occupy the building during the work on the electrical equipment. "I never got any help from TUSD at all. They just hid behind their law firm," Carevich said.

Johnston said the driver was suspended without pay for failing to properly apply the brakes before leaving the bus.

Weightlifting injury

Daniel Wilson, 20, didn't have any better luck when he filed a claim against the district last year, alleging he was injured in December 2007 during a gym class when he was a senior at Palo Verde High School. He said he was told he'd have to lift his body weight to get an A in the class. "I'm a small person, and I had never lifted weights or anything, but I always got good grades in school, and I felt I should get an A," Wilson said.

So he lifted 145 pounds, but his arm buckled and the weights crashed down on his face, sending him to a hospital. He said he continues to have problems with nosebleeds and is seeing a plastic surgeon about getting the cartilage shaved inside his nose because it cracked and stabs the inside of his nose. The district denied his claim because he waited too long to file.

Wilson is now a full-time student studying premed at Pima Community College and hoping to transfer to the University of Arizona next fall and eventually study psychiatry. He said he was disappointed in the result, because he hoped it would lead to the school taking more precautions. "I really thought it was incompetence on the teacher's part. And it caused me problems, so some sort of settlement would have been nice. But I also wanted to make sure it didn't happen to somebody else."

That's the same reason a lawyer said his client filed suit against the district earlier this year after a 7-year-old boy was choked by another child during lunch recess at Warren Elementary School. Weeks later, the boy had a stroke and required hospitalization -- a turn of events his lawyer chalked up to the playground incident and ongoing bullying that school officials didn't curtail. The family alleges the attack resulted in a torn artery that led to strokes and neurological deficits.

A trial date has not been set.

Thomas Bayham, the attorney in the case, said the mother had complained to school administrators a few times that her son was being bullied, including an earlier incident of choking, but it was not addressed.

The district argued in its court documents that the boy started it and denied that the subsequent health problems stemmed from the incident.

Bayham said the boy, now a third-grader no longer at Warren Elementary, is trying to move on and has had no strokes recently, although he continues to struggle with reading and will be limited in future activities, such as sports.

"One of the objectives here is to ensure the safety of other kids who have been subjected to bullying and harassment, and to prevent this from happening to other kids in the future," Bayham said. "This won't end without some pronouncement about the rightness or wrongness of what happened. It's not going to get resolved one way or another without some degree of confirmation that steps are being taken to ensure kids' safety."

General Liability Claims

Year Number of claims Liability incurred Payout after insurance

2004-05 96 $312,681 $312,281

2005-06 65 (with three cases still open) $302,890 $302,863

2006-07 70 (with five cases still open) $5,200,110 $498,372

2007-08 72 (with two cases still open) $218,730 $218,280

2008-09 63 (with 11 still open, and more could still be filed) $152,436 $152,436

2009-10 2 to date $5,090 $5,090

Source: TUSD Risk Management

DID YOU KNOW

There are nearly 600 workers' compensation claims filed every year by Tucson Unified School District employees who hurt themselves -- more than six times the number of general liability claims that are typically filed in the district. With 527 falls, those stumbles account for nearly 20 percent of the cases over the past five years. Second place, with 183 cases, or 6 percent of the total cases, included workers who were struck by special-needs students. In all, nearly 300 claims resulted from staff members being hit by students.

In terms of dollars, though, general liability is more expensive per claim. The district incurred about $6.1 million in liability from 388 claims over the past five years. That compares with $7.3 million incurred in the nearly 2,950 workers' compensation claims filed over the same period.

DID YOU KNOW

The city of Tucson, which had 6,000 employees in 2008, paid a little more than $1 million for public liability claims during fiscal year 2009. The total number of claims filed during fiscal year 2009 was 815.