Williams v. Weatherstone

15 N.E.3d 792, 23 N.Y.3d 384
CourtNew York Court of Appeals
DecidedMay 13, 2014
StatusPublished
Cited by11 cases

This text of 15 N.E.3d 792 (Williams v. Weatherstone) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering New York Court of Appeals primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Williams v. Weatherstone, 15 N.E.3d 792, 23 N.Y.3d 384 (N.Y. 2014).

Opinions

OPINION OF THE COURT

Read, J.

In Pratt v Robinson (39 NY2d 554, 561 [1976]), we held that a school district that "undertake[s] to transport students” assumes a common-law duty to “perform so much as it ha[s] undertaken in a careful and prudent manner.” We are called upon to decide whether this duty had arisen here where a child was struck by a car before the approaching school bus stopped to pick her up. We conclude that defendant Jordan-Elbridge Central School District (the District) did not owe this or any other common-law duty to the child under the circumstances presented.

I

On the date of the accident, March 13, 2008, A. was a 12-year-old sixth-grade student at Jordan-Elbridge Middle School. Her mother, plaintiff Rhonda Williams (plaintiff), described A., who was born in 1995, as having exhibited “behavioral issues” while in kindergarten. Plaintiff at first chalked this up to A.’s young age (she was a four-year-old kindergartner) and grief over the then recent death of her father. But even after A. repeated kindergarten, she remained “very behavioral, noncom-pliant, [and] couldn’t identify letters, numbers, that type of thing.” A. was diagnosed by her doctors in the Albany area, where plaintiff then resided, with ADD/ADHD (attention deficit disorder/attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and mild mental retardation. At the age of seven, A. began receiving Supplemental Security Income benefits on account of her mental disability.

[390]*390Plaintiff moved from the Albany to the Syracuse area in March 2005. Desiring to mainstream her daughter’s schooling as much as possible, she enrolled A. in the Jordan-Elbridge school system, subject to an individualized education plan (IEP).1 A.’s IEP for the 2007-08 school year, which plaintiff assisted in formulating, specified under “Special Transportation Needs” that A. “should be transported to school even when she is within walking distance, due to concerns regarding her safety (big bus).” There was no provision for any escort or monitor to assist A. with busing.

Plaintiffs residence in March 2008 fronted Route 5, a busy state highway. A.’s designated bus stop was at the end of the roughly 20-yard driveway connecting her home to Route 5. A red dumpster was located on the grass to one side of the driveway, about 15 to 20 feet away from the mailbox, which is where the school bus stopped. Plaintiff testified that A. typically left the house at about 6:50 a.m., and played for 10 or 15 minutes near the dumpster while waiting for the bus to arrive; that she imposed “a very strict rule” that A. was never allowed past the dumpster at any time when playing in the yard; that she told A. to wait at the dumpster until the bus completely stopped at the mailbox; and that A. was never allowed to cross Route 5 unescorted. According to plaintiff, A. dependably followed and observed these “guidelines” and “boundaries.”

On March 12, 2008, the District’s transportation supervisor rerouted the bus that A. had been taking since the beginning of the school year so as to pick up several children from a family newly moved to the District. Since this bus no longer passed A.’s house, he assigned her to another bus whose existing route did. A.’s house became the first stop on this bus’s route; her pick up and drop off times remained almost exactly the same. There was a monitor on this bus for students who, unlike A., [391]*391were subject to IEPs that required the District to provide them with extra assistance during the commute to and from school. But the monitor knew A. as she had previously worked with her one-on-one as a teacher’s aide. They became reacquainted when A. rode home after school on March 12th on her newly assigned bus.

On March 13th, A.’s newly assigned bus, with the monitor onboard, left the bus garage on time, at about 6:50 a.m., or before sunrise.2 A.’s house was less than 10 minutes away, much closer than the previous first stop on this route, and the bus driver simply forgot to pick her up as he traveled west on Route 5. Neither the driver nor the monitor waved or otherwise signaled to A., whom the monitor glimpsed standing near the red dumpster as the bus passed by.

Alerted by the monitor to the missed stop, the bus driver proceeded 250 feet or so farther west to a vacant gas station on the corner where Route 3IB meets Route 5 at an angle. He turned right into Route 3 IB and entered the gas station, turned the bus around to face Route 5, waited for eastbound traffic to clear (there was no westbound traffic at the time) and exited onto Route 5, traveling east behind a car operated by defendant Sharon T. Weatherstone (Weatherstone). The bus driver intended to go past A.’s house on the opposite (east) side of Route 5 a few hundred feet to a golf course, also on the highway’s east side, where he could turn around again and pull back onto Route 5 traveling west. This would put him in position to pick up A. at her designated stop at the foot of the driveway to her house.

Shortly after the bus driver headed east on Route 5, though, both he and the monitor caught sight of what appeared to be debris being flung up into the air in front of the Weatherstone vehicle. Weatherstone steered her car off onto the shoulder of the highway, and as the bus driver slowed the bus down, the monitor spotted A. lying, obviously seriously injured, in the eastbound lane.

The State Police’s “Collision Reconstruction Findings Report” (Collision Report) attributed the accident primarily to pedestrian error and secondarily to an obstructed view resulting from [392]*392Weatherstone’s failure to adequately clear frost from her car’s windshield.3 When asked at the General Municipal Law § 50-h hearing if she had ever queried A. about “why she went out into the road” that morning, plaintiff replied that A. told her “that they forgot her and then they stopped and she looked both ways and she ran,” which was the only explanation A. ever gave her. A. also testified about the accident at the 50-h hearing and gave a deposition. While her testimony was sketchy and variable, she fairly consistently said that she saw the bus go by and turn around, and that she looked both ways before crossing the road to catch the bus on the other side. A. further testified that plaintiff had told her to “be careful in the middle of the road . . . [b]ecause cars can hit you.”

On October 27, 2008, plaintiff commenced this personal injury action individually and on behalf of A. against Weatherstone and the District. The District moved for summary judgment on October 21, 2011, seeking an order dismissing plaintiff’s complaint and all cross claims against it. The District argued generally that it owed no duty to a student not within its physical care or custody and that, in any event, its purported negligence was not a proximate cause of A.’s injuries. The District and plaintiff submitted warring affidavits from experts in the field of school bus transportation. The experts differed about the propriety of the actions or inactions of District employees, and whether anything these employees (especially the bus driver) did or failed to do proximately caused the accident.4

On March 1, 2012, Supreme Court denied the District’s motion in its entirety. Citing Pratt, the judge noted that while a school district “owes its students a duty to exercise the same degree of care toward them as a reasonably prudent parent. . .

Free access — add to your briefcase to read the full text and ask questions with AI

Related

D.W. v. Archdiocese of N.Y.
2026 NY Slip Op 30725(U) (New York Supreme Court, New York County, 2026)
JMH 200 Doe v. Jagiello
2025 NY Slip Op 05388 (Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York, 2025)
Quinn v. Wallkill Sch. Dist.
188 N.Y.S.3d 224 (Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York, 2023)
Nationwide Mut. Fire Ins. Co. v. Oster
2021 NY Slip Op 02400 (Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York, 2021)
Deb B. v. Longwood Cent. Sch. Dist.
2018 NY Slip Op 7280 (Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York, 2018)
RITCHIE, DONNA v. CHURCHVILLE-CHILI CENTRAL SCHOOL, DISTRICT
Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York, 2014
Ritchie v. Churchville-Chili Central School District
122 A.D.3d 1265 (Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York, 2014)
Ferguson v. City of New York
118 A.D.3d 849 (Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York, 2014)
Elissa v. City of New York
44 Misc. 3d 526 (New York Supreme Court, 2014)

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
15 N.E.3d 792, 23 N.Y.3d 384, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/williams-v-weatherstone-ny-2014.