A Florida man’s 16-year journey to collect a million-dollar court judgment against a school district following a life-altering school bus crash finally succeeded. Elsewhere, others aren’t as lucky.
When he was 16 years old, Marcus Button was in a car crash with a school bus, leaving him with life-altering traumatic brain injury, loss of vision, and a 16-year journey to collect a court-ordered, million-dollar judgment for damages.
On Sept. 22, 2006, Button was riding to school in the passenger seat of his friend’s Dodge Neon when a school bus took a left turn through an intersection and into the car’s path, leaving Button’s friend with little time to brake. Button struck the windshield.
“Not a week goes by that I don’t think about this case,” said Button’s attorney, J. Steele Olmstead of Tampa, Florida. “He was a hardworking young man who mowed lawns at the trailer park where he lived. He was going to grow up, learn a trade, have a wife and kids, but now he’s just a shell.”
Olmstead said Button planned to enter his family’s drywall business, but his crash-induced disabilities closed that future.
The Button family sued the Pasco County School Board of Land O’ Lakes, Florida, the following year. At trial, Button’s own expert left ambiguous the issue of whether Button had been wearing a seatbelt, prompting the jury to find him 15 percent at fault and his friend 20 percent at fault, placing the remainder of the responsibility on the school district’s shoulders.
In 2009, the jury awarded Button $1.38 million and his parents $289,396. Despite the court judgment, the school district paid out just $163,000 until this year. State law caps government liability at $200,000 for individuals and $300,000 per incident.
While government immunity shields public entities from most lawsuits, and depending on the state, can provide strict liability caps, Florida has an unusual workaround: The claims bill process.
The system dates to the 1830s, when the builder of the state’s second capital building was stiffed on his bill, prompting the territorial legislature to step in with the power of the purse to award his costs.
“The Florida Legislature has a history of trying to right wrongs when the courts can’t,” said Lance Block, who has practiced personal injury law in Florida for more than four decades.
Last year, Block helped reach a $1.2 million settlement with the Pasco County School Board that included the entity’s support on Button’s claims bill. This pact helped push the unopposed passage of Button’s claims bill this year, after the legislature had rejected at least four similar efforts. Both the House and Senate unanimously approved the measure in April.
“People do get justice from time to time, when and if they were in another state where they would be capped, there would be no other recourse,” said Block who has carried about 50 claims bills to the legislature.
Had Button’s crash occurred in another state, it is unlikely he would have found success in overriding the government immunity cap.
After Ashley Zauflik lost her leg in crash with a school bus, a Bucks County Court in Pennsylvania granted her a $14 million judgment in 2011, of which she received the $500,000 allowed under state law. The state supreme court reviewed Zauflik’s case in 2014, and a divided panel ruled the immunity cap did not violate her civil rights.
In other cases, special circumstances even heighten a public entity’s immunity. In a 2021 suit against the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Board of Education claiming a school bus had hit a parked car while delivering meals during the pandemic, the North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled Gov. Roy Cooper’s declaration of a state of emergency outright barred lawsuits against the government for property damage.
Liability caps on individual cases do not protect school districts from repeated lawsuits, prompting some to outsource the risk entirely by contracting out transportation. Transportation contractors are not entitled to government immunity and take the full risk of liability head on.
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Although immunity statutes serve to protect public coffers from being drained by lawsuits, the system is not without critics who don’t think the government should be let off the hook.
The system also becomes more complicated when it comes to obtaining insurance and filing claims. Government insurance policies are as varied the U.S. topography, with some insurers covering government entities up to their liability cap and others declining to kick on until after the government has paid out the liability cap.
Some states don’t require government entities to obtain insurance at all, and others choose to self-insure through risk-management offices or use publicly funded insurance programs.
In 1992, Block in Florida represented the family of Megan Tucky, a 7-year-old child with a disability who was strangled by her restraint while riding a school bus home. In the middle of the trial, the parties settled the case for $700,000, which did not need a claims bill to be paid out, since the school district’s insurance policy covered the cost.
In Button’s case, Block said the bus that hit him was covered under a Loyd’s of London policy that declined to cover people injured in vehicles outside of the insured bus, a policy he called grossly inadequate for a school district, throwing his client’s fate into the state claims bill lottery.
“Marcus was 16 years old,” Block said. “This totally changed his life, so he’s definitely deserving of this compensation, and I wish it was for more, but this is all we were able to do.”
The post Florida Man’s School Bus Crash Claim Highlights Limits of Government Immunity appeared first on School Transportation News.
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