Parents of Bullied Teen File $20 Million Lawsuit
A 13-year-old gay boy's parents have sued Everett Public Schools for failing to stop their son from being harassed.
The parents of a gay 13-year-old student who was allegedly severely bullied for more than a year have sued a suburban Seattle school district for $20 million, alleging school and district officials failed to take sufficient action to end the harassment.
The youth’s parents, Nicole and Doug, spoke to the Seattle Times on condition of not having their last name published. They claim that their son, a former seventh grader at Evergreen Middle School in Everett, Washington experienced repeated harassment due to his sexual orientation.
The boy, who is openly gay, said he was bullied so severely that he would routinely come home crying. Although he said the harassment started out small, his bullies carried out a campaign of harassment so severe that eventually “half the school” began routinely heckling him with insults in the hallways.
He was also reportedly subjected to anti-Asian as well as anti-gay slurs.
“I’m known in the school, and I’m gay, and that makes me an immediate target,” he told the Times.
Nicole and Doug say the other students at the school attacked their son using offensive slurs, in one instance even demanding he get off the school bus. After that incident, Nicole began driving her son to and from school.
Nicole and Doug also claim their son faced physical bullying. The pair claim that he was twice beaten up in fights videotaped on phones, and uploaded onto an Instagram page devoted to brawls at Evergreen Middle School.
The two videotaped incidents — one in December, one in May — were uploaded to the school’s unofficial Instagram page. The teen’s older sister showed the Times moments from the video where her brother appears to be on the ground, getting punched and kicked.
The fights left the teen sore and bruised and so anxious that he must take medication to sleep, his parents say.
A group of girls among the teen’s biggest tormenters began provoking fights. Though Nicole and Doug’s son had previously been friends with the group, referring to him as their “gay friend,” something caused a rift that led them to begin harassing him over his sexual orientation.
While there were other out gay students at his school — including those belonging to a Gender and Sexuality Alliance-style “rainbow club” until the faculty adviser left last year — Nicole and Doug’s son says he believes he was singled out for harassment because he was more outgoing.
Nicole and Doug say they repeatedly called school and district administrators, including the principal, demanding actions be taken to protect their son.
The leader of the group of girls who were among the teen’s biggest harassers was moved to a different lunch period, but she and her friends showed up during his lunch period to taunt him. Instead of addressing the problem, Nicole and Doug say administrators failed to discipline the students involved or stop the bullying.
Following the May fight, the parents pulled their son from school and filed a report with the Everett Police Department. But an investigating officer issued a report concluding that “no racially or sexually biased language was used during the incident.”
Everett police also concluded that the alleged bullying was best handled by school officials, citing a state law that discourages officers who work in schools from seeking criminal sanctions for students.
Nicole and Doug have since turned to the legal system in the hope that their lawsuit will change how the district handles such matters.
Sim Osborn, the attorney representing Nicole and Doug in their lawsuit, contends that the difficulties their son encountered are reflective of systemic problems in how the district deals with allegations of bullying and harassment.
“The school district has a duty to provide a safe learning environment,” Osborn told the Times.
Although the videos of Nicole and Doug’s son appear to have been taken down from the Evergreen Instagram page that documents fights at the school, Nicole claims there’s at least one other nearly identical fight page on Instagram. To her knowledge, the second site does not contain videos of her son’s harassment.
Still, Osborn pointed to the proliferation of such pages as evidence of the school district’s ineffectiveness when tackling the issue of bullying.
“How do they not know about a website?” he asked. “Or if they do know about it, why do they allow it to continue?”
Nicole told the Times she wants Evergreen administrators and the students involved in the harassment to be held accountable, which is why the lawsuit cites seven students, identified by their initials, as involved parties or witnesses, and references Evergreen Middle School and Everett Public Schools as the entities responsible for curbing such harassment.
The district has 60 days to respond to the lawsuit, which alleges that the lack of action to address the harassment of Nicole and Doug’s 13-year-old son is a violation of Washington State’s law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Kathy Reeves, a spokesperson for the district, told the Times, “The district will actively investigate the administrative tort claim allegations,” and declined to comment further.
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