Delaware Business Lawyer Blog

As a Delaware attorney who represents students who are being bullied (and their parents), what I usually find is that the parents who meet with me are exhausted from trying to protect their child, and they feel like they’re up against a brick wall. Because October 2010 is National Bullying Prevention Awareness Month, I’d like to share some resources that will be of interest to any parent of a child who is being bullied in school or on the school bus.

What To Do If Your Child Is Being Bullied - published by the U.S. Dept. Of Health & Human Services

Bullying at School and Online - published by education.com.

Bullying Prevention and Response - published by the U.S. Dept. of Education - this is an excellent site that provides links and a newsletter

Kids Against Bullying - for elementary school students

Teens Against Bullying - published by National Center for Bullying Prevention

Bullying and Harassment - published by Wrightslaw - contains links to a great many resources

Each year, the Delaware Department of Education is required to prepare an annual report of certain offenses, including bullying, that occur in school. The School Safety and Discipline Report for the 2009-2010 school year shows, among other things, the following:

(1) 21,690 students were either suspended or expelled - this represents 17.11% of the student population

(2) 556 incidents of bullying

(3) 2,585 incidents of offensive touching of a student

(3) 194 incidents of terroristic threatening of a student

(4) 118 incidents of sexual harassment

We all know that crime statistics only reflect the crimes that are reported, and that may victims don’t call the police. Well, the same thing applies to bullying in schools. The annual report does not tell the entire story because not all acts of bullying are reported by the victims. And in those cases where the victim does report it, the schools don’t always report it to the Dept. Of Education even though they are obligated by law to do so. By concealing the fact that bulling occurred in their school, the school deprives the Department of Education of the ability to take corrective action, and perpetuates an atmosphere in which bullying can exist.

A school that fails to take effective action when it learns of incidents of bullying reinforces the power dynamic that bullying depends on, and it sends a message to the students that bullying is acceptable.

With all of the press coverage these days, bullying in school is clearly a predictable pattern of behavior. As a result, bullying is foreseeable. In Delaware, schools and school districts have to comply with legally mandated requirements relating to bullying. As Delaware attorney who protects the rights of students who are bullied, let me share with you some of these requirements.

(1) Duty to Inform Administration: If a school employee is aware of information that would cause a reasonable person to suspect that a student is being bullied, that employee has a duty to report it to the school administration.

(2) Duty to Investigate: The school administration has a duty to promptly investigate to see whether bullying actually occurred.

(3) On-Site Committees. At each school there has to be a committee on site that is responsible for the school’s bullying prevention program.

(4) Duty to Notify the State Department of Education: Each and every incident of bullying must be reported to the Department of Education within 5 days.

(5) Communicating Policy: Each school’s bullying prevention policy has to be printed in the student handbook and the staff handbook.

(6) Annual Reports: All incidents of bullying that are reported to the Department of Education must be included in the annual School Conduct Reports for the School and for the District.

Students and their parents must be informed that there is a procedure in place for reporting acts of bullying, and the steps to follow under that procedure. They also have to be informed that retaliation for reporting bullying is strictly prohibited.

It’s bad enough to lose your job, but it adds insult to injury when your employer refuses to pay you the final wages, salary or other compensation you earned. In Delaware, we have a law called the Wage Payment & Collection Act. In a nutshell, here’s what it provides.

Whenever an employee’s job is terminated, even in those cases where the employee resigns, Delaware law requires the employer to pay all wages earned by the employee on the next regularly scheduled payday. If the employer fails to pay the employee’s wages when due, the employer will also owe the employee a penalty equal to 10% of the unpaid wages for each and every day that the failure to pay continues. The highest the penalty can get is the amount of the unpaid wages, in which case the employee gets double his unpaid wages.

Of course there are exceptions and conditions that apply, but that’s the basics. Oh, there’s one more thing. The employer also has to pay the attorney’s fees that the employee incurs in collecting the unpaid wages.

As can be expected, disputes over unpaid wages sometimes end up in Court. The Court’s decisions in these cases interpret and analyze the law to give us a better understanding.

For example, the term “wages” sounds simple. And even though the Act gives us a definition of “wages,” that definition is not as clear cut as one would hope. Even figuring out when a payment is made can be difficult - is it made when the employer mails it or when the employee receives it?

Another area of dispute is the definition of “employee.”

In this series of articles, we’ll examine the issues that often come up, and we’ll talk about how the Courts have resolved them.