When we drop our kids off at school, we expect the facilities that they’ll be housed in throughout the day to be safe. We also trust that the staff that we’re going to leave our children with the whole day will keep a watchful eye over our kids.
You hope that it will never happen to your child, yet hundreds if not thousands of school-aged kids suffer injuries at schools happen each year across Atlanta. While most cases are relatively minor, not all are.
If your child’s injury occurred while either on the premises or while using the property of a public school system, then you’ll ultimately be fighting against a government agency. This is critical to know because defendants that operate in the public sector are generally immune from being sued for certain types of injuries.
While the government agency can agree to move forward with the lawsuit themselves, it’s very unlikely that they’ll want to do so. Therefore, unless there is a statute in place that allows you to file a lawsuit for your child’s particular injury, then your options may be few.
When a child is injured while on a private school’s premises or under their care, the process is much different. That’s because, as you may suspect, the same immunity laws that protect government agencies don’t apply to private ones. The only case in which they do is if the school receives funding from the federal government.
If it doesn’t, then you may be eligible to demand that you be paid damages, whether it’s done through the private school’s insurance company or formally by filing a negligence lawsuit. Also, whereas you have one year to file a claim against a government agency, for private ones, you have up to two.
In the case of school bus accidents, an injured victim or his or her parent can generally file a lawsuit up to the max allowable cap on the insurance policy that their respective county has taken out. And, in other negligence cases where a special immunity clause is in place, it may be possible to sue the teacher or school administration in their individual capacities.
If your child has been injured at a school, then an Atlanta premises liability attorney can help you sort through the many different legal remedies that you have at your disposal in your respective case.
Source: FindLaw, “How to sue a school in Atlanta for injuries,” accessed Sep. 01, 2017
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