Plaintiffs Withdraw Lawsuit Against OUSD

After three days of trial, three years of controversy, parents withdraw complaint

SEE EARLIER POSTS AS TRIAL BEGAN

By Daryl Kelley
Three days into a Superior Court trial, parents who’d claimed their children were harassed after they complained about profanity and sexual content in a book withdrew their lawsuit against the Ojai Unified School District, ending three years of controversy and expense.
Parents Betty Craven and Jeff and Rosalyn Luttrull abruptly withdrew their suit Thursday morning, following opening statements Wednesday and testimony by veteran teacher Linda McMichael that she did not retaliate against girls in her fifth-grade class after their parents complained about a book she assigned to counter playground bullying.
In interviews, the parents said they ended the case because federal and state judges had so narrowed its scope it would have little effect, and because they feared their children would be harmed by testifying.
Ojai educators named in the suit said they were relieved that they can finally put a costly nightmare behind them and get fully back to the business of education. The district is still tabulating the cost of the case, which is being covered by insurance, and Superintendent Tim Baird said he could not immediately provide an estimate.
But Jeff Luttrull said he’d spent about $100,000 pressing the claim through federal and state courts, and seeing its breadth dramatically reduced by judges. “It was a matter of principle,” he said.
Standing in an emptying courtroom Thursday morning, McMichael, a 26-year teacher at San Antonio School, said she was crying with relief.
“I’m in shock; I’m overwhelmed,” she said. “It’s been a lot for three years to hold onto.”
She said the suit had changed her forever: “I’m much more diligent about what I do and fearful,” she said. “It’s affected all the teachers in our district because everyone is now terrified of litigation.”
Baird, also a defendant in the case, said he was relieved and that the district’s actions had now been proven justified.
“I would say it was a waste of money and time,” he said. “And I’m glad it’s over.”
But Jeff Luttrull, a Ventura eye surgeon, said he still believes the district had been negligent in its oversight of the content of books assigned in local public schools. But he said the final straw was the limiting of the surviving negligence claim in recent days by Judge Henry Walsh, so jurors could not rule on whether the district was negligent for allowing the controversial book into the classroom, but only on whether educators were negligent in allowing retaliation against the girls.
“They’ve gotten immunity from most of the things I was concerned about,” he said. “So it was now basically, ‘he said, she said.’ It’s two little girls, and all we can ask the jurors to do is form an opinion. I’m not interested in putting the jurors through that, and I’m not interested in putting the girls through that.”
Craven said the decision was simple in the end.
“After opening statements, I could see how it was going to go regarding the girls,” she said, “and I couldn’t put my girl through that. Initially, it was just stand up for the right thing, but seeing how the system would have worked, I couldn’t put her though it. It would cause more harm than good.”
The decision to withdraw followed opening arguments Wednesday afternoon during which the parents’ lawyer, Cathy Elliott Jones, occasionally sparred with Judge Henry Walsh.
As she ended about 45 minutes of summary statements, Walsh assisted her in regaining her train of thought: “You were going to talk about the loss of innocence,” he said.
And Jones responded: “I was going to use an analogy, but I don’t want to make you mad.”
Prompting the judge to say: “This case is not about you and me.”
Then, while Jones was questioning McMichael on the stand, Walsh asked Jones to sharpen and clarify her questions, at one point saying he didn’t understand what she was asking the teacher.
Jones has refused to discuss the case with the Ojai Valley News, saying it has not treated her clients fairly.
On Wednesday, the aftenoon before the parents ended their case, a nervous McMichael testified that she never retaliated against the girls, but said she finally concluded they should be moved from her class because their parents told her superiors they no longer trusted her.
“I liked these girls,” said McMichael, who has taught her entire career at San Antonio School, a tiny East End campus. “The kids, in my mind, didn’t feel like I was picking on them.”
The spring 2005 dispute tore the tight-knit San Antonio School community apart, with one side calling for McMichael’s removal and the other saying she was being bullied by overly protective parents.
Although McMichael immediately withdrew the controversial book and school officials changed district policy on use of such supplemental materials, parents of three girls removed them from the school after a series of events they said harassed their children.
The parents filed a lawsuit in September 2005, claiming negligence and retaliation by school officials and a violation of the students’ and parents’ civil rights. Of the nine original counts, judges reduced the case to the single negligence claim. Parents of the third child had already dropped out of the lawsuit.
As Jones’ first witness, McMichael acknowledged that several weeks into the controversy she asked her superiors to move the girls into another class.
“I started to think some of the things I did might be considered retaliating,” she said. “The parents made comments that they did not trust me, and I had 28 other kids in my class I needed to teach.”
Early on, in a meeting with Baird, those parents had asked that the teacher be removed from her classroom because she lacked judgment in assigning the anti-bullying book, which contains several explicit passages about sex and drug use and the pressures on children to engage in both at a young age.
McMichael’s written request to move the girls followed six weeks of community debate about whether the book, which she assigned only to fifth grade girls, was appropriate for young girls and whether she and her superiors had responded to the turmoil appropriately.
She, Baird, school principal John LeSuer and the district were defendants in the case. Craven and the Luttrulls sought monetary damages for the girls’ emotional distress and to pay the mounting costs to educate the Luttrulls’ children in a private school. Craven’s daughter remains in a public school.
On Wednesday, Jones questioned McMichael about several incidents the lawyer said showed retaliation against the complaining families.
“Are you feeling well today?” Jones immediately asked McMichael.
“No,” the teacher said nervously.
Jones asked McMichael about an incident that prompted the parents to remove the girls from the school: When the teacher allowed a student to read a ‘current event’ about the book controversy in class and call for support of the teacher.
McMichael testified that she knew nothing of the content of the current event before the student began to deliver it, and then she had to make a snap judgment about whether it was better to allow the girl to finish the short presentation or to stop it, which she said would have highlighted the issue in the minds of others students.
“I can certainly see how it could be perceived to be bullying to the girls,” McMichael acknowledged. “I had been trying all along to keep this out of the classroom, so for me to have said anything about this to the entire class would not have been good judgment.”
Yet, McMichael said she was horrified by the presentation, and immediately apologized to two of the girls in private. The third girl had left the school and complained to her parent.
The next day the parents withdrew their children from the school.
During opening arguments, Jones said the case was about the “loss of innocence” by young girls being exposed to inappropriate material and then abused by school district officials when their parents dared complain.
The lawyer dwelled on the language and content of the book McMichael had assigned: “Please Stop Laughing at Me,” an autobiographical account of teen-age bullying by Jodee Blanco. On 15 large placards, Jones displayed the curse words and sexual situations found in several parts of the book.
For example, when the author wrote that she had handed her high school yearbook to a boy on whom she had a crush, the boy inscribed in capital letters: “YOU’LL HAVE TO (EXPLETIVE) YOURSELF, WE HATE YOU, B---H.”
“We’re not here because we’re right-wing zealots,” Jones told the jury. “We’re here because of what happened when (the Luttrull child) protested. These little girls were 10 and 11.”
Until the controversy, Jones said her clients received good grades for citizenship from McMichael, and the Luttrull girl was chosen a peer counselor by the teacher. Then they were characterized as trouble-makers.
“Two or three weeks earlier they were shining little beams of light ... ,” Jones said. “What happened in a matter of weeks, days? ... Suddenly, they became troublemakers, they became bullies.”
Nor were the parents troublemakers, the lawyer said. The Luttrulls had long supported school fund-raising events and Rosalyn Luttrull had volunteered in her daughter’s classroom. Craven, a single mother with a daughter with learning problems, had spent her time trying to meet her child’s special needs.
Jonathan Light, lawyer for the district, said the case was about the over-reaction of parents to what his clients admit was an inappropriate book for fifth-graders, but which had been used successfully the previous year without parent complaints.
Before the book was distributed, McMichael had asked the parents in a note to read the book with their children, but they did not until the Luttrull child complained about the content, he said.
The book was immediately withdrawn by McMichael, who apologized to the parents, he said. And it was only after they insisted that the teacher be fired and continued a campaign against her that the dispute escalated into a community debate, he said.
Indeed, district officials thought the issue had been resolved after parents met with Baird, LeSuer and McMichael on March 30, a week after they’d first complained about the book to the teacher.
He described the educators’ response as “rational, reasonable, quick.”
But three weeks later, Jeff Luttrull distributed fliers at the school asking parents to attend a school board meeting to complain about the book: He attached examples of the book’s most controversial passages to the flier, Light said.
“Dr. Luttrull’s flier was the catalyst that upset the community,” Light said.
About this time, Jeff Luttrull allegedly said: “I want Linda McMichael fired and if the district doesn’t do it, I am going to sue and make them pay,” the district’s lawyer told the jury.
“And that is why we’re here today,” he said Wednesday.
Luttrull denied that he asked that McMichael be fired, although he did ask that she be reassigned.
The trial was expected to last up to 10 days before it was dismissed Thursday morning.