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A Utah family dropped its lawsuit recently against Davis School District, Davis High and former English teacher Brianne Altice.

The primary facts are not in dispute.

Everyone acknowledges Altice had several inappropriate — and illegal — sexual relationships with three underage male students. The teacher pleaded guilty in April. Normally, the parents of the kids she victimized could sue her and potentially her employer to cover the boys' medical bills and therapy.

But in some ways, the facts don't matter. The school district is shielded by state statute.

The Utah attorney general's office cited a 22-year-old Utah Supreme Court precedent — Ledfors v. Emery County School District — in its argument to nullify the parents' suit: School districts, as governmental entities, are immune from liability in cases of assault.

In essence, if your kid is hurt by another person — a teacher, a bullying student, or anyone — on school district property, you can sue their attacker, but you can't sue the school.

Utah immunity laws have been written to shield state government and all its subdivisions — cities, towns, school districts — from being held responsible for injuries that happen on their watch or in their spaces.

But 20 years ago, those involved in the Ledfors case were shaken by its ramifications. And today, at least one lawmaker questions whether schools should face legal consequences when students are assaulted.

"We have too many students fearful of going to school," said Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper. "That should be the safest place on Earth, and it's not."

"Kind of appalled" • Richard Ledfors' torment started immediately after the family moved to Utah.

In the early 1980s, the boy and his family moved from Ohio to Castle Dale for the father's coal-mining job. The boy was bullied repeatedly — almost as soon as the family got to town — said Debbie Ledfors, his mother.

"I was getting called [from the school district] right and left," she said. "We weren't Mormon and weren't from there and they didn't like us."

The teen's parents spoke to school administrators, identified the students who were harassing their son, asked them to protect him.

Still, Ledfors was attacked one day in 1989, assaulted by two boys when his gym class was left unattended. Other classmates desperately searched for an adult to intervene. The youth was hospitalized for several days with injuries to his head, abdomen and back. The family sued the district to try to recoup the cost of the medical bills.

Four years later, the Utah Supreme Court dismissed the Ledfors' lawsuit. At the time, the justices acknowledged they were hamstrung by Utah's broadly written Governmental Immunity Act.

Justice Michael Zimmerman expressed sympathy in his opinion. It would be up to Utah's Legislature, he said, to craft laws that better protect student safety.

"It is unfortunate that any parent who is required by state law to send his or her child to school lacks a civil remedy against negligent school personnel who fail to assure the child's safety at school," Zimmerman wrote. "Nevertheless, the Legislature has spoken with clarity on the question of immunity, and we are constrained by the plain language of the act and our prior case law on this point."

The family was shocked.

"We were just kind of appalled," Debbie Ledfors said. "They stuck up for those boys, and our son was the one that ended up paying the consequences for it."

The Ledfors sued their son's attackers and moved back to Ohio as soon as they could. The family lives there today, and her memory of the trauma has faded.

Meanwhile, school districts across the state have continued to cite the Ledfors precedent to rebuff lawsuits during the past 20-plus years.

Lawmakers have tinkered with damage caps in the law, but have left the substance of the statute intact.

The law, and legal precedent, set a high hurdle for plaintiffs to clear, according to Assistant Utah Attorney General Joel Ferre, who argued the recent negligence case for Davis School District.

"Absent a legislative change or the [Utah] Supreme Court overruling or changing the law through judicial decision," he said, "it is what it is. It's been there for a very long time."

"The king can do no wrong" • Government immunity is hardly unique to Utah.

The notion of school district immunity, Ferre said, can be traced to colonial England. Under British law, citizens cannot sue the government unless it allows itself to be sued. In legal parlance, the concept is known as "rex non potest peccare," or "the king can do no wrong."

Utah law holds government immune from liability as a default, with such protection waived in specific circumstances, according to David Church, general counsel for the Utah League of Cities and Towns.

Government employees could be liable for injuries caused while they are performing their jobs, Church said. But because an assault falls outside the duty of those workers, the law places liability on the individual.

Put another way: Bus drivers are hired to safely drive a bus, but not to molest students.

So, in theory, parents could successfully sue a school district if their child is injured while riding in that bus, but not if they are attacked by the driver.

"The government, under no theory, hires people to assault people," Church said, "or trains them to assault, wants them to assault or consents to assault."

Ferre said schools could face liability if administrators know about an unsafe situation and fail to address it. For example, a district could be held responsible in a slip-and-fall case in which nothing has been done to mitigate a dangerous sidewalk or staircase.

"There's no immunity for that," he said. "Those are garden-variety cases that we litigate all the time."

However, if the unsafe situation is a teacher who is developing an illegal relationship with a student or the classmates who were harassing Ledfors, the analysis is different.

Plaintiffs typically try to allege negligence on the part of a teacher or school district — such as inadequate supervision — but Ferre said clearing the bar against suing over an assault is difficult.

"The focus under the immunity act is what caused the injuries," he said. "That is the burden they have to prove — that somehow their injuries didn't arise out of one of these immune acts."

In 1993, a case was dismissed against the Davis County Board of Education after a man was knocked unconscious by a high school basketball announcer during a fight.

The next year, the state was found to be immune from a sexual assault committed by a taxi driver hired to transport students to the Utah Schools for the Deaf and Blind.

And, in 1996, a case was dismissed against the Ogden School District after a student's arm was pushed through a window by another student.

But immunity was not granted when the Washington County School District was sued by the family of Tucker Thayer, who was killed in 2008 after he fired a prop pistol the school had approved for a play. With no assault involved, the Utah Supreme Court concluded the district "may not insulate itself from suit by routinely authorizing and approving the negligent conduct of its employees."

Besides assault and battery, governments in Utah are immune from "false imprisonment, false arrest, malicious prosecution, intentional trespass, abuse of process, libel, slander, deceit, interference with contract rights, infliction of mental anguish, or violation of civil rights."

Church defends the wide protections for government. Immunity laws aren't meant to isolate the government from blame, he said, but instead shield taxpayers from paying for the actions of individuals.

"When you make a claim against any unit of government," Church said, "you're just making a claim against the community as a whole."

Stephenson said the underlying premise behind governmental immunity is wrong.

"The notion that the king can do no wrong," he said, "is part of the reason that we separated from England."

Stephenson has sponsored several bills aimed at expanding governmental liability and increasing damage caps.

This year he plans to sponsor legislation to boost the amount of money payable to victims of governmental negligence. Those settlements are capped at $700,000 for individual victims and up to $2.4 million for a group of victims.

Utah's immunity laws are "reprehensible," Stephenson said. "Government immunity should not exist in a free society."

Risk prevention • Despite Utah's sweeping limits on governmental liability, some families have attempted to hold school districts responsible for attacks on their children.

After being harassed at school, a Bennion Junior High student killed himself outside school property in 2012, his family worked with lawmakers on a bill requiring schools to obtain a signed record of notification if a student threatens to commit suicide or is involved in a bullying incident.

Stephenson believes limiting governmental immunity would lead to fewer instances of bullying and assault within Utah schools. If immunity were removed, he said, all levels of government would scramble to reduce the risk of injury.

Still, the potential for liability to affect institutional change is a point of ongoing debate among lawyers and lawmakers, according to Zimmerman, who now works as an appellate lawyer.

A lawsuit has the power to send a message, he said, but not all sources of injury are readily preventable. If improvement is the goal, he added, some would argue that rather than giving money to victims, the community would be better served by awarding money to the government agency involved with a mandate to mitigate future injuries.

"Does exposing a school district to liability really do the surgical work that needs to be done?" Zimmerman asked.

Church argues limiting governmental immunity would only lead to more taxpayer dollars being used to defend school districts in court.

"There would be more claims and more cost," Church said. "It's just a matter of money, like anything else."

State Sen. Lyle Hillyard, R-Logan, said the threat of increased legal costs helps keep government immunity on the books. "Governmental agencies are far better lobbyists at the Legislature," Hillyard said, "than the poor guy who gets hurt on the street."

The Ledfors family left Utah in 1994, a year after their case was dismissed.

Ledfors finished high school in Montana.