Attorneys for California school boards argued in the 4th District Court of Appeal in late July that school boards should not be responsible for failing to protect students harassed for being GLBT or so perceived.

The appeal pertained to former Poway High School students Joey Ramelli and Megan Donovan, to whom a San Diego jury awarded $300,000 in damages three years ago, finding that Poway school officials had shown “deliberate indifference” in the face of their complaints that fellow students were harassing them because of their real or perceived sexual orientation.

The case should have ended with the trial; at the very least, school district officials should have settled with the two students. But, as I predicted, school boards don’t want to be saddled with protecting claims of harassment involving gay and lesbian students. Consequently, according to a report in the Daily Journal, a legal periodical, the school boards now contend that the California Education Code (which prohibits discrimination against GLBT students) does not allow for the recovery of damages by injured students because students don’t suffer damages as would workers who lose wages by being injured on the job.

Recovering monetary damages has never been the objective of these cases; trial lawyers don’t advertise for injured GLBT students. But students who are gay-bashed suffer emotional scars, sometimes for the rest of their lives. And their parents often incur expenses, because they subsequently send their kids to private school. Consequently, monetary damages are entirely warranted.

In the Poway case this is especially so, since although school boards are not liable for attacks on GLBT students unless they have knowledge of prior attacks on those students, the Poway case’s six-week trial produced evidence that Poway school officials had been well aware of numerous instances of harassment directed at Donovan and Ramelli. Yet, rather than expel the perpetrators, the officials merely gave GLBT students consent to leave classes early or late, so as to avoid confrontations in the hallways ? a response so unequal to the situation that the jury concluded the officials had demonstrated “deliberate indifference.”

Although the school officials had not simply ignored the students’ concerns, the jury concluded that school officials did not do what “reasonable” school officials should have done. When students commit a hate crime, school officials don’t punish the victim; they track down those responsible and refer them to law enforcement agencies.

The school boards, naturally, want to confuse the issue. They counter that they can’t guarantee a hostility-free environment; therefore, the law should not punish them for failing to stop harassment in our schools. But California law says school officials need to do what is reasonable under the circumstances. The jury in the Poway case said that not only did school officials not do what was reasonable, they showed deliberate indifference to the students’ claims.

Stripped of the legalese, the simple issue raised in this case on appeal is that school boards don’t want to enact policies or take measures to protect GLBT students. But that’s not going to fly with California courts, especially in light of the death of openly gay student Lawrence King, shot to death by a classmate in Oxnard.

The California Court of Appeal should uphold the jury verdict in the Poway case, and school boards supporting this waste of public money should end this litigation.