In the comments section of yesterday’s post about teacher immunity, Katie was kind enough to point out that the bill being discussed in the article was HB 1462. As it pertains to immunity, the bills says:

In all matters relating to the discipline and conduct of students, school corporation personnel . . . have qualified immunity with respect to a disciplinary action taken to promote student conduct under subdivision (2) if the action is taken in good faith and is reasonable.

By my reading, this immunity provision is essentially worthless. A teacher’s immunity for disciplining a child hinges on an assessment that the discipline was “reasonable.” To me, that looks an awful lot like a basic negligence standard.

School discipline was also the subject of an article by Bill Engle of the Richmond Palladium-Item.

Richmond Community Schools board member Linda Morgason believes that one way school officials can raise student achievement in the classroom is to support teachers by giving them other methods for removing disruptive students.

It’s a tough problem. One or two disruptive students can have a huge impact on the rest of the class — encouraging the rest of the crowd to be disruptive itself or, at least, taking a disproportionate amount of the teacher’s resources. What do you do? Throw the kid out? Obviously you need to reach out to the parents, but that has its own challenges. Some parents are too overworked and overwhelmed to do much of anything, other parents simply aren’t good parents and are not inclined to do much of anything to correct their children. Engaged and energetic parents can sometimes exacerbate the problem — disbelieving that *their* child could be part of the problem and responding by attacking the school.

School administrators, from what I hear, often aren’t terribly good at backing up teachers in such situations; caving to the pressure of the parents and leaving the teacher feeling like it’s pointless to even try. (And, sometimes, frankly, the teacher is the problem, making it tough to commit to backing up the teacher in all circumstances.)

I’m glad I’m a blogger – it’s a lot easier to identify problems than to actually fix them.

Mike Smith, writing for the Associated Press, has a story on a bill passed by the General Assembly that conveys some immunity for teachers against lawsuits by students disciplined for being disruptive. I am getting some error messages when I try to call up the General Assembly website, so I’m unable to look at the specifics.

According to Smith:

Some educators have told lawmakers that parents of disruptive students often threaten to sue when teachers try to keep them from acting up or leaving their seats without permission.

The bill would give teachers so-called “qualified immunity” from lawsuits when they take reasonable actions to impose classroom discipline.

That means judges can dismiss such lawsuits at the beginning of the legal process, rather than forcing teachers or schools to waste time and money defending themselves.

Maybe this is different, but “qualified immunity” in the context of suits alleging civil rights violations is difficult to take advantage of. Frequently, whether or not the immunity should be enjoyed requires quite a bit of factual development — police officer says one thing happened while plaintiff-suspect says another thing happened. Police version is entitled to immunity and suspect version is not. In that context, the immunity doesn’t really protect the officer from a long, expensive lawsuit even if it might ultimately protect him or her from judgment.

I don’t know that it’s possible to word a statute so that a teacher who is justified in a disciplinary act gets dismissed quickly and painlessly from litigation while leaving the courts open to students who have been abused by a teacher that goes over the line.

I feel a little sorry for Senator Waltz. He sent a reasonably simple two or three page bill over to the House having to do with allowing state property and highway rights of way to be used to grow vegetation that can be used for fuels or energy products.

Now the House is sending SB 374 back to him on a 54-45 vote as a 122 page Goliath with all kinds of fun stuff inside, including new provisions on how the Toll Road money can be spent and a study commission on the feasibility of a passenger rail system from Chicago to Evansville. That’s right, I said Evansville. I didn’t mean Cincinnati. Western Indiana is the wave of the future.

And, the bill allows counties to create a regional transportation district to plan, design, acquire, construct, enlarge, improve, renovate, maintain, equip, finance, operate, and support public transportation systems.

There is more in there as well. I won’t pretend I’ve read the entire 122 pages.

The House passed SB 209 on a party line vote. It is an election law bill where the House added a whole bunch of stuff to the bill the Senate initially sent over.

Among other things, it requires a precinct election officer to tell a voter why his or her vote is being treated as a provisional ballot and requires the voter to be informed of the steps necessary to make that ballot official. It further requires the circuit court clerk to, within three days, tell the voter why the ballot is being treated as provisional, what needs to be done to make it official, the deadline for doing so, and provide contact information to the voter. Additionally, the county election board would be required to provide a list of the names and addresses of provisional voters to party chairmen and/or candidates whose name were on the ballot.

I know the right to vote is frequently described with dramatic, reverent sort of adjectives. But I suspect the General Assembly will lose its appetite for ensuring that right if it requires this much bureaucracy.

Ah, sweet, sweet insurance – the mother’s milk for personal injury attorneys. (And there is probably an Oedipal extension of that metaphor to be had with respect to the PI attorney’s love/hate relationship with insurers.) In any case, HB 1090 provides a bit of clarification with respect to which insurance policy is deemed primary for a motor vehicle passenger.

It is not uncommon for injured people to get caught up in a case of dueling insurance policy. In this case, the passenger might have an insurance policy of his or her own while, at the same time, the owner of the motor vehicle has insurance. Both insurers would like the other insurer to pay. Both policies probably have some policy language that says, “if there is any other insurance available, we won’t cover the loss until that policy is exhausted.” HB 1090 specifies that, in such a case, the motor vehicle owner’s insurance coverage gets tapped first.

HB 1058 passed the Senate on a vote of 48 – 2. It requires the Department of State Revenue to develop an annual report that: (1) identifies the total number of taxpayers that live within a particular incorporated city or town; (2) identifies the total adjusted gross income of those taxpayers; and (3) any other information that can be abstracted from the taxpayers’ individual income tax returns, as agreed to by the department and the Legislative Services Agency. It requires the Dept. of State Revenue to provide this information to LSA upon a written request and the agency’s agreement to maintain its confidentiality.

The Senate will return HB 1014 concerning age discrimination in a form significantly modified from how it passed the House. The Senate version simply increases from 70 years of age to 75 years of age the maximum age limit for age discrimination claims.

The amount of time the General Assembly devotes to license plate issues continues to amaze me. The Governor signed into law HB 1258 which allows vehicles with POW plates to be parked at a metered space free of charge. The statute specifies that “a person other than the owner or lessee” is not entitled to the parking privileges. Good luck to the enforcement officers trying to sniff out the POW plated cars being driven by someone other than the POW or the POW’s surviving spouse.

The Governor signed into law, SB 545, which affects fishing and hunting laws. It amends a provision requiring a controlled hunt in a state park to be established through the adoption of an emergency rule.

It also raises the ages for some youth-oriented fishing and hunting rules: The age to which no fishing license is required is raised from 17 to 18, the age for which free hunting days are available is raised from 16 to 18, and it adds trapping to the activities allowed under a yearly resident youth consolidated license. I think the tide is about to turn in our teen obesity epidemic.

Finally, the bill eliminates the requirement that DNR rules regulating commercial fishing in the Ohio River conform to the laws of Kentucky. So, my question is this: if we use this to start over-fishing the Ohio River, will we be beset by a plague of Kentucky pirates?

SB 89, the bill that requires abortion doctors to have admitting privileges in the county or adjacent county to where the abortion is performed has been significantly amended in the House. Most significant seems to be Rep. Cheatham’s amendment that expands the requirement from abortions specifically to surgical procedures generally. Representative (Dr.) Tim Brown added an amendment requiring doctors, prior to performing an abortion, to inform women that a fetus might feel pain. And, Rep. Fry added a provision that funds breast and cervical cancer screening programs.

Cheatham’s amendment passed on a voice vote, Brown’s amendment passed 62-27, and Fry’s amendment passed 95-0.