OUSD Lawsuit Costs Top $315,000

Defense against parents’ claim likely to rise to $350,000

By Daryl Kelley
The consortium that insures the Ojai Unified School District against legal claims has paid about $315,000 to defend the district against a lawsuit by parents who claimed their children were harassed after they complained about profanity and sexual content in a book.
The tab is still mounting, officials said, and could reach $350,000 by the time all legal bills are paid.
The parents dropped their claim last month, three days into trial and nearly three years after they filed it amid a bitter controversy that divided the San Antonio School community.
Plaintiff Jeff Luttrull said he and his wife, Rosalyn, spent at least $100,000 pressing their case before abandoning it because judges had thrown out eight of its nine counts and its scope was so small it could have no real effect.
This week, the tiny Ojai school district confirmed just how much time and money had been spent by the defense.
The district released documents to the Ojai Valley News showing that the Ventura County Schools Self Funding Authority, a consortium of 21 local districts that pools money as insurance against lawsuits, had already paid $314,890 in legal fees and other expenses.
That total does not count legal bills for February, which include trial preparation and three days of trial.
“It won’t be until April that all the bills from lawyers and expert witnesses come in, but they say definitely at least $30,000 is still un-billed,” said Dannielle Pusatere, the district’s superintendent for business and administrative services.
Of the services billed so far about $274,000 have been paid to Oxnard-based Nordman Cormany Hair & Compton, the county’s largest law firm, while about $28,500 has gone to Goleta-based Gregory B. Bragg & Associates, a claims and risk management company.
Pusatere said officials do not know yet whether the suit will cost the district more in annual insurance premiums, because the district’s payment is based on losses by all 21 school districts each year. The overall fund may have done well despite spending $350,000 over three years on this case, she said.
“The premium depends on how all 21 districts do,” Pusatere said. “They say they have a pretty good fund balance in the pool right now, so they can’t really say what the change is going to be, if any.”
Typically, the Ojai district pays $140,000 to $150,000 a year in premiums for property and liability insurance, she said.
School Board President Steve Fields said he wished the district hadn’t spent a penny on the case, but that fighting the suit was the right thing to do.
“There are times when we need to stand up and say we think the accusations are wrong and we need to defend ourselves,” he said. “One reason we have insurance is to be able to do that.”
The district’s lawyers thought the case would be dismissed early and cost little, Fields said. But a pair of negligence counts stuck through federal and state courts until last month, when a Superior Court judge threw out one of the two just before trial.
“I think if we would have settled to save money,” Fields said, “we would have been criticized for just settling to have it go away.”
Superintendent Tim Baird, a defendant in the case, said the district could not settle, because the plaintiffs insisted that veteran teacher Linda McMichael be removed for allegedly retaliating against their children for complaining about a book she assigned to counter playground bullying.
Nonetheless, Baird has called the suit a huge waste of time and money. Not included in the documented costs was time lost from their jobs by McMichael, Baird and school principal John LeSuer in battling the case. When McMichael was absent, her class was guided by a substitute teacher.
“They wanted Linda’s removal or firing and that just wasn’t justified,” Baird said Tuesday. “The settlement they offered was basically throwing Linda to the wolves, and I wasn’t going to do that.”
Luttrull, an eye surgeon, said Tuesday that he considered the case a waste of money since the district could have settled early at little expense. But he said it was worth the $100,000 he spent if the district learned to be more responsive to parent concerns.
Luttrull said he tried to end the suit in its early stages, offering to settle for $5,000 in his legal fees, a letter of apology to parents whose children were in McMichael’s class, a directive to district teachers that the state education code says classroom materials should be “age appropriate” and training teachers on what is appropriate.
Luttrull acknowledged that he also asked that McMichael be removed from her classroom, although he never asked that she be fired.
“With the teachers’ union, you can’t do that,” he said. “And her removal was not essential. That wasn’t a deal-breaker. We just wanted to see them accept some responsibility for what had happened, but instead we were just told to get lost.”
He also said another of his children was in fourth grade at San Antonio and he wanted to make sure she did not get McMichael as a teacher the following year.
Jonathan Light, lawyer for the district, said that his clients never received a formal settlement offer from the parents, nor did the district formally offer to settle.
The district maintained throughout that it responded promptly to the parents’ concerns: McMichael withdrew the offending book immediately and apologized to the children and parents, and Baird assured the parents in a lengthy meeting a week later that district policy would be changed to require screening of supplemental materials in classes.
Indeed, the educators thought the issue was resolved until three weeks later at the meeting with Baird.
Then, Luttrull distributed fliers with passages from the book to parents as they came and left San Antonio, and then pressed his case before the school board.
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.
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.
The remaining plaintiffs, Betty Craven and the Luttrulls, sought monetary damages for the girls’ emotional distress and to pay the mountings cost to educate the Luttrulls’ children in a private school. Craven’s daughter remains in a public school.
Luttrull said he abandoned the case partly because the negligence count pertaining to use of an inappropriate book had been dismissed by the trial judge.
“If I had unlimited funds, I would have appealed,” he said.