SARANAC LAKE - A young girl who was bullied, harassed and assaulted in school because of her race has filed a $6 million federal lawsuit against the Saranac Lake Central School District.
The girl, who is referred to in court papers as A.O., and her parents, Amy and Hiram Oliveras, filed a complaint Monday in U.S. Northern District Court, alleging the school district violated her civil rights and the state's Human Rights Law by failing to protect her from bullying, racial discrimination and harassment.
School Superintendent Gerald Goldman, who's one of the defendants named in the lawsuit, said Friday that he hadn't received a summons and otherwise declined to comment. He referred the Enterprise to the lawyer representing the district in the case, Benjamin Pratt of Glens Falls-based Bartlett, Pontiff, Stewart and Rhodes, who didn't respond to a telephone message Friday. In addition to the school district and Goldman, the suit names Middle School Principal Patricia Kenyon, the district's Board of Education and board President Debra Lennon as defendants.
The complaint alleges the girl, who is now 12 years old and whose father is of Caribbean descent, was "subjected to a learning environment hostile toward her on account of her race." It cites several incidents that took place during the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, the summer of 2010 and the fall of 2010.
In one of those incidents, which took place June 21, 2010, the contents of the girl's backpack were smashed and a racial slur was written with her deodorant on the sidewalk outside the Saranac Lake Middle School. School officials were told about what happened shortly thereafter, but the racial slur wasn't washed off until eight days after the incident.
The backpack incident sparked a firestorm of criticism against the school district. School officials responded with an apology, admitting in a letter to the Enterprise that they had failed in their responsibility to protect the girl and vowed to do better.
Village police investigated the backpack incident, but no arrests were ever made. Goldman told the Enterprise in June of this year that school officials were never able to determine "with any degree of certainty who had written those words that were scrawled on that sidewalk," though they had their suspicions.
Despite the district's promises to protect the girl, the lawsuit claims the bullying and harassment continued. The complaint says the district arranged for the girl to be the summer school partner with a student who was a suspect in the backpack incident, and who had previously grabbed the girl's breast and threatened to beat her up. In September 2010, the complaint says, the same student pushed the girl down several stairs at school. These incidents were reported, the complaint says, but no suspension or other action was taken against the student.
The girl is being represented in the case by A.J. Bosman, a Rome-based lawyer who is director of the Children's Rights Initiative, a nonprofit organization that provides free legal services to indigent children.
"The allegations and the factual background were that she was being victimized," Bosman said Friday, "both at a level of bullying in the sense that that's what happened, and that she was being subjected to racist conduct that was not being addressed by the school district."
After the girl and her parents filed a notice of claim, a precursor to a lawsuit, against the district in September 2010, Bosman claims the family was subjected to retaliation. They were told to relocate to another school district, and the girl was repeatedly taken out of class to speak to school officials, which Bosman says resulted in further embarrassment and intimidation for the girl from her fellow students.
"Instead of responding to that in a way that would be responsible and corrective, they responded to it in a way that suggested maybe the child should leave," Bosman said.
Amy Oliveras said Friday that she was advised to keep her daughter, who's now an eighth-grader, in the school district, as moving to another district could create more anxiety for her. She said her daughter still suffers from the emotional stress of being bullied.
"She doesn't go to sleep until 3 o'clock in the morning," Oliveras said. "She has to take anxiety medicine because she's worried about going to school. She's anxious every day, but she's doing much better. I just didn't think the aftermath of bullying would be like this."
Oliveras said she filed the lawsuit because she wants to teach her daughter that she has to stand up for herself, and because she wants to make sure this kind of bullying doesn't happen to anyone else.
"The worst part was the adults didn't care to do anything about it, and that's not right," Oliveras said. "You can let some things go, but there's some things that are just not forgivable to me."
The girl and her parents are seeking $1 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages. Among other things, they're asking the court to mandate training and educational programs for employees and students about discrimination, and to require annual reports "demonstrating efforts and success at compliance in providing a discrimination and retaliation-free education environment."
Over the past year, school officials have taken some steps to address what happened. The school board implemented a new harassment, hazing and bullying policy. The district hired an outside group to put on a series of diversity training sessions for teachers, administrators and school board members. School officials have also been training support staff - custodians, bus drivers, lunch monitors - to be more observant and report any bullying and harassment they see.
"We've tried to respond to what happened in all the ways we possibly could," Goldman told the Enterprise in June. "We certainly don't want to have a school district where kids feel unsafe and there's an environment that condones bullying or intolerance."