Court Opinion

ID: 9679330
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 06:49:32.192084+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:17:12.662133
License: Public Domain

SIMONETT, Justice
(dissenting in part).
I would grant a new trial on liability only because of the perverse verdict and, therefore, to this extent, I respectfully dissent from the majority opinion.
The 12 girls in the cheerleading squad decided on their own initiative to banner. Karen Pitoscia, 17, the driver, first knew she was to drive at 10 p.m. Friday night, August 29. She borrowed her parents’ van with permission. The record does not disclose what she told her parents. Karen began picking up the other girls between 1 and 2 a.m. Robin Verhel, the plaintiff, age 16, was picked up at her home at 2 a.m. Robin said her mother did not like her going, “but I told her I had to go because all the other cheerleaders were going.” She also told her mother that Karen Pitos-eia might be driving, but she was not sure. The girls intended to stay out all night, driving to some 60 homes in the City of Duluth, concluding with a 6 a.m. breakfast. As they went on their way, the group of girls in the van were singing and, as Robin put it, “just goofing off.” The accident happened at 5 a.m. This is the kind of activity that one might reasonably foresee could lead to an auto accident.
I would phrase the main issue: Did the school district assume control and supervision over the bannering activities of the cheerleaders during their all-night excursion of August 29-30, 1980? There are two subissues: To what extent, if any, was bannering a part of the cheerleading program? And did the school district know the girls were planning to banner on the night in question?
While plaintiffs referred to bannering as a “tradition” at Denfeld High, the trial record suggests it was at best a sporadic, but acceptable, activity. Clearly, however, bannering, unlike a scheduled football game, was an optional activity, not required as part of the cheerleading program but something the girls — who had a great deal of discretion — might, impromptu, on their own initiative, decide to do. If the girls decided to banner, the squad' captains were expected to discuss the proposed activity with their advisor. In this kind of situation, the school district’s duty to supervise the bannering would not arise until it knew or should have known that the bannering was going to take place. Ordinarily, a school district’s duty to supervise is based on the fact that parents have relinquished custody of their children to the school for school activities and, consequently, the school is charged with the duty of protecting the children while in its charge. See Pratt v. Robinson, 39 N.Y.2d 554, 384 N.Y.S.2d 749, 349 N.E.2d 849 (1976); Restatement (Second) of Torts, § 320, comment (b) (1965). Here, unless the school knew or had reason to know otherwise, it had a right to assume the children were in their parents’ custody and under their supervision that summer weekend.
*594If Diane Williams knew or should have known that the girls would be bannering that night, the school had a duty to take reasonable measures that the activity would be done in a reasonably safe manner or not done at all. Nobody disagrees with this proposition. Ms. Williams and Dr. Samskar, the principal, both testified forthrightly that they would have taken protective measures if they had known about the girls’ plans. It is also clear that the school district would be charged with whatever notice its employee Williams had.
Consequently, the nature and extent of Diane Williams’ knowledge was critical, and the evidence on this issue was sharply contested. The jury found Williams negligent and her negligence a direct cause of plaintiff’s injuries. Presumably, the jury found that Diane Williams knew about the bannering and failed to do anything about it. Indeed, the jury foreman said as much to the clerk in a colloquy when the verdict was submitted. But then, in apportioning the causal negligence of the parties, the jury found just the opposite. It found no negligence on the part of Williams contributed to cause the accident. If this means, as it might, that Williams did not know about the bannering, then to the extent that Williams and the school district were found negligent for failure to supervise the activities on the Friday night involved, the verdict was perverse. Plaintiffs suggest the jury may have felt that Williams knew about the bannering plans but excused her because she had not been properly instructed by the school district. This, however, overlooks the fact that Williams testified she would have acted, even without further school district instructions, if she had known of the bannering.
The jury may have been misled by another aspect of this case. It is always a problem how to submit the comparative fault question to the jury when a corporation and its. employee are both defendants and both are claimed to be negligent in their own right and the corporation is acting, at least in part, through the defendant employee. Here the school district could have been negligent, independent of any conduct of Williams, as for example, by failing to promulgate appropriate cheer-leading regulations or by failing to instruct adequately its employee Williams on her cheerleading duties. At the same time, Williams could be negligent, if on notice, in failing to supervise the bannering that occurred, and, since her conduct is the conduct of the school district, the school district would also be negligent for failing to supervise the specific bannering activity. The jury might have felt that the 35% causal negligence it put on the school district included Williams’ negligence and, therefore, that assigning any more negligence to Williams would be superfluous. Apparently it is on this theory that plaintiffs ask that we change the jury’s verdict to hold Williams and the school district jointly liable for 35% causal negligence, although this assumes that the jury found no negligence on the part of the school district independent of Williams’ own negligence — a point on which Williams might disagree.1
In any event, it seems to me that to reconcile the perverse verdict on this record would be an exercise in guesswork, and that the proper solution must be a new trial on liability only for all parties.
It can be argued — and, indeed, was argued unsuccessfully to the jury — that supervisory responsibility rested not with the school district but with the parents. There was, however, little testimony on this issue. No parent testified that their child was allowed to go bannering after midnight in reliance on any representation that the child was at a supervised school activity. Nevertheless, the issue here is not only a *595parent’s responsibility, but the school district’s, and it cannot be said that as a matter of law sole supervisory responsibility rests with the parents. On the other hand, it would be unfortunate and incorrect if this case were construed to impose some ill-defined supervisory duty on school districts over all aspects of extracurricular activities. If this were true, prudent school administrators, with limited resources, would tend to curtail worthwhile extracurricular programs. What distinguishes this case, I think, is there was evidence that bannering was an acceptable school activity; that the bannering involved use of a motor vehicle under circumstances that might reasonably be foreseen to present the hazard of an auto accident; and that the accident occurred during performance of the school activity itself.

. Perhaps the jury might be instructed to keep the negligence of the corporation and its employee separate, and the court, after the verdict comes in, then adds the employee's percentage of negligence to that of the corporation’s to arrive at the corporation's total causal negligence. Or only the corporation's negligence is included in the comparative negligence question and the jury is then given a second comparative negligence question asking the jury to state what percentage of the corporation’s causal negligence is to be allocated to the employee.