Fortune has nothing to do with it. These were our decisions and there was no luck involved.
Wow, you must not have read my post very well. IT IS NOT WORKING OUT FOR US, yet, we continue. We live in what some people would call poverty. 7 children, small house, one vehicle, and only foods of necessity. That's not working out, that's 'just getting by'. Yet, we do it anyway.
Now only your daughter has my sympathy. Yes, she was injured. Maybe we can get a trillion dollar judgment against the school district and taxpayers. I hope any money you get is forced to be placed into an UTMA account so that your daughter actually benefits from it, and not you. Sorry, but this "we must sue everyone for everything" era is wearing thin on me. Don't worry though, if you are successful I will hope my kid trips and gets a bruise on the playground while at school. Hopefully I will get a couple million out of that and get schools to cease playtime and remove all those dangerous slides, swings, and monkey bars.
In fact, while you type that you are so concerned about your daughter, and constantly harp on how badly this could have turned out, why didn't you or your wife contact the Day Care to make sure your daughter was there?Perhaps I should stop work every five minutes and call the school to make sure she's there and all right too? Seriously. I was not expecting any problems. I followed the procedures right down the line. I had the written form that she was supposed to be put on the day care bus and that she was supposed to go to daycare, not home, after school. And I had the verbal assurance that they were familiar with the specific daycare involved, a verbal assurance that was repeated both by the office secretary/receptionist and the principle of the school.
I had no reason to expect any problem and don't generally call when there isn't an expectation of a problem.
Now, yesterday, I did call the daycare to check. Once I became aware of a problem I then followed up to make sure that it was handled properly this time.
I didn't sit out the school all day and watch either. There's "everything" and there's "everything reasonable."
I wasn't blaming the daycare, note that my wording was "the only place where they fell short." It was a minor side issue, not a major component. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that when I say on Tuesday "from tomorrow you will be picking up my daughter after school" that when she's not there on Wednesday to call me and check on it--exactly the same as I would expect a call if she got hurt or sick or had a nosebleed, all under the "if there is a problem" and "emergency contact" provisions of our actual written contract.
Check your assumptions. In fact, check them at the door.
If it's actionable and if I pursued action any damages awarded would be used (given my druthers) to put Athena in a private school.
And the backlash of "never use the law for what it's there for" is just as wearing.
I'm not talking about a bruise on the playground. I'm talking about leaving a six year old girl alone, on the street, in direct violation of not only the parents' stated, written instructions but in violation of actual school policy.
If you really think that's comparable to "a bruise on the playground" than I really have little more to say to you.
I suppose that you think that my wife suing a trucking company that rear ended her car, doing $30,000 dollars worth of damage, truck driver being cited for "speed too fast for conditions", sending my then seven months pregnant wife to the ER with bleeding from the birth canal that had us very scared about the safety of our child, and pulling me out of work to drive up to Lafayette so I could go get her and take her home (the smallest part of the whole affair), and then tried to deny responsibility for the accident when we filed the insurance claim justifies you suing someone for a million dollars for "pain and suffering" because they keyed your car.
And they should be worried about non-frivolous lawsuits.
You don't understand it because it's not happening. You've somehow turned a side-note about a minor "less than perfect" into some kind of crusade.
I didn't even say I was angry at the daycare. Mind you, they were still in consideration for being in "the line of fire" for my anger in the early stages of the denoument when the possibility that they just didn't pick her up was still on the table. When it became clear that it was the school putting her on the wrong bus rather than them just not picking her up they got reduced to a "this is something that could have been done better."
Even when you have to imagine things beyond what is actually being said. Got it.
Not quite. I contacted a lawyer (not, BTW, a personal injury lawyer since I have a pretty good idea what they would say beforehand, but a defense attorney who also has experience as both a prosecutor, a judge, and a JAG) to see if the situation was actionable. It's a question of "is this actually 'actionable'" in the sense of rising to the level where a lawsuit is legitimate.
The rest is your own imagination.
More imagination on your part. I guess you think the provision of the Constitution which allows for civil suits should be removed.
Or maybe you think instead of letting the law decide I should either just suck it up or deal with it with a baseball bat in a dark alley.
And, of course, you just assume I'm asking for that.
Then of course we have the parents who suffered "emotional trauma," and they will want $20,000,000 each. Then the neighbor got involved, likely scared for life at the sight of a scared child crying, another $10,000,000 for the neighbor. Oh, and the teacher couldn't sleep after finding out about this, she better sue her employer for a half million. This Halloween I might go around finding adults putting on scary masks to scare kids and sue them on behalf of the child. Of course such actions make me sad, so I may as well ask for a hundred grand or so myself.
And, of course, all of those are so comparable to leaving a six year old girl alone, on the street, with no supervision in sight, in direct contravention of both written parental instructions about where the child was to go and in contravention of their own policies.
BTW, while I was writing this, the lawyer called back. We had a nice chat. He said that he did think the school was liable but that assessing damages would be difficult, on the order of "if I had to leave work early to go get her, what that cost me". Fair enough.
Now, we also talked about if such an incident happened again, that would be a pattern of behavior and more serious. In that case, my thought, which the lawyer thought was doable, would be to sue to have the school put my daughter in a private school of my choice where they would see that she's taken care of properly. Now, mind you, tactically that might involve asking for a bunchaton of money up front and settling for school tuition--either as a direct payment or a trust or what have you--but the goal would be putting Athena where she can get the education she needs while seeing to her safety by those given care over her.
You might want to think that not everybody abuses the system before you start kicking with that jerking knee.
Right because calling every five minutes to be sure people are doing what they actually agreed to do is exactly comparable to not following their own procedure for calling the parents when there was a problem with their child.
Seems like a decent analogy to me. All the years MiniJet was in private school, we were still taxed to pay for public education and busing. I don't recall any refund to offset private tuition.
