Skip to main content

New Jersey school sued over bullied girl's suicide



The parents of a 12-year-old girl who took her own life are suing the school district in the US state of New Jersey, saying it failed to prevent bullying.
Dianne and Seth Grossman say the school ignored repeated complaints that their daughter was being targeted.
The legal action says Mallory was sent text and Snapchat messages calling her a "loser", making fun of her looks, and prompting her to end her life.
Rockaway Township school district declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Filed on Tuesday, nearly a year after Mallory's death on 14 June 2017, the lawsuit accuses Copeland Middle School of failing to take significant action to prevent bullying.
It alleges that the school's response was to force Mallory to hug one of her alleged bullies, in lieu of disciplinary action, and accuses the school district of discouraging her parents from making a formal complaint.

Administrators also suggested she avoid her harassers by eating in an office instead of the lunchroom, the lawsuit alleges.
The school district issued a statement in August of last year saying "the allegation that the Rockaway Township School District ignored the Grossman family and failed to address bullying in general, is categorically false".
The statement also said that school officials had been directed not to comment further on the case.
Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday, the Grossmans' attorney, Bruce Nagel, said complaints to the school had been "terribly ignored" and called smart phones "a lethal weapon in the hands of the wrong child".
"We are hopeful that the filing of this lawsuit will bring national awareness to the epidemic of cyber-bullying and that we do not have to attend any more funerals of students who have been the victims," Mr Nagel said.
Mrs Grossman told News 12 she wanted the school to "care less about test scores and care about the emotional intelligence" of children.
"Instead of removing Mallory from choir class," she said, "I wanted the girls that were tapping her chair every other day and calling her a [expletive] - I wanted those children removed from class. Not Mallory."
The lawsuit is the first cyber-bullying suicide case filed in New Jersey. The families of the group of girls accused of bullying Mallory have been notified that they could face legal action, Mr Nagel said.
School personnel and the township as a whole were also named in the lawsuit for failing to ensure children's safety in a local school.
In a letter posted on the school's website in April , the town's board of education said school superintendent Greg McGann, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, would be "commencing a leave of absence" through 30 June 2018.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Spring Security with JWT for REST API

Spring is considered a trusted framework in the Java ecosystem and is widely used. It’s no longer valid to refer to Spring as a framework, as it’s more of an umbrella term that covers various frameworks. One of these frameworks is Spring Security , which is a powerful and customizable authentication and authorization framework. It is considered the de facto standard for securing Spring-based applications. Despite its popularity, I must admit that when it comes to single-page applications , it’s not simple and straightforward to configure. I suspect the reason is that it started more as an MVC application -oriented framework, where webpage rendering happens on the server-side and communication is session-based. If the back end is based on Java and Spring, it makes sense to use Spring Security for authentication/authorization and configure it for stateless communication. While there are a lot of articles explaining how this is done, for me, it was still frustrating to set it up for the f...

Java Functional Interfaces

  The term   Java functional interface   was introduced in Java 8. A   functional interface   in Java is an interface that contains only a single abstract (unimplemented) method. A functional interface can contain default and static methods which do have an implementation, in addition to the single unimplemented method. Here is a Java functional interface example: public interface MyFunctionalInterface { public void execute(); } The above counts as a functional interface in Java because it only contains a single method, and that method has no implementation. Normally a Java interface does not contain implementations of the methods it declares, but it can contain implementations in default methods, or in static methods. Below is another example of a Java functional interface, with implementations of some of the methods: public interface MyFunctionalInterface2{ public void execute(); public default void print(String text) { System.out.println(t...

Java Logger

In Java, logging is an important feature that helps developers to trace out the errors. Java is the programming language that comes with the logging approach. It provides a Logging API that was introduced in Java 1.4 version. It provides the ability to capture the log file. In this section, we are going to deep dive into the Java Logger API. Also, we will cover logging level, components, Logging handlers or appenders, logging formatters or layouts, Java Logger class, What is logging in Java? In Java, Logging is an API that provides the ability to trace out the errors of the applications. When an application generates the logging call, the Logger records the event in the LogRecord. After that, it sends to the corresponding handlers or appenders. Before sending it to the console or file, the appenders format that log record by using the formatter or layouts. Need for Logging It provides the complete tracing information of the application. It records the critical failure if any occur in ...