Thinking Outside the Bus: Revitalizing the Role of a Teacher's Standard of Care During After-School Hours

Abstract

A staggering 14 million school children are left unaccompanied every afternoon on America’s elementary, middle, and high school campuses. While some loiter around waiting for a parent to pick them up, still others wait for a ride home after finishing up an athletic practice or music rehearsal later into the evening. When something goes wrong and an unsupervised child ends up injuring themselves or damaging property during after-school hours, who is responsible? Is the school liable for not monitoring these students or do parents bear the burden of making sure their child arrives home safely and out of trouble? Such questions have few answers from a compulsory education system wrought with nationwide inconsistencies, contradictory jurisprudence, and one-sided immunity practices. In its present condition, this custodial blame game does little to make after-school environments safer for America’s schoolchildren.

Fortunately, a legislative opportunity to clarify these liability concerns will immensely benefit teachers, parents, and students alike. In my analysis, I present an original catalogue of state education codes that offers insight into the best practices of how states handle the delicate transition of custodial powers from school to parent. A unique cross section of case law accompanies that catalogue to further examine how our country’s legal system has attempted to rectify such uncertainty in the past. While the topic of after-school liability has often gone unreported and unresolved in many of America’s courts and state houses, a brave few have taken up the issue, and the solution is clear: model legislation must be drafted to provide a standardized approach that benefits students everywhere.

The model legislation I propose includes (1) an elevated professional standard for teachers monitoring campuses after school, (2) bright-line education code that requires school districts statewide to adhere to standardized language, and (3) recommendations for schools to better engage their local communities in hopes of offering clear solutions for getting kids home safely. Alongside such model legislation is a practical analysis of the resources involved in such reform, and an acknowledgement that much of the infrastructure already exists to make this solution a practical reality. In the end, our school children deserve clearly defined practices determining who has supervisory liability upon the conclusion of the school day.