By Mike Smith
The Associated Press
INDIANAPOLIS — When a student once put teacher Angie Morgan in a choke hold, she said she waited for another adult to remove the student instead of acting on her own because she was afraid of hurting the child and being sued.
She was among those in the governor’s office Monday when Gov. Mitch Daniels signed a bill that proponents say will give teachers more legal protections for trying to maintain discipline in schools.
“I think this is going to give the support we need without having that fear in the background,” said Morgan, who teaches third grade for Hamilton Southeastern Schools.
The bill was the only plank of Daniels’ legislative agenda to pass during the regular session of the General Assembly that ended April 29.
Some educators have told lawmakers that parents of disruptive students often threaten to sue when teachers try to keep them from acting up or otherwise disrupting school activities.
The new law will give teachers so-called “qualified immunity” from lawsuits when they take reasonable actions to impose classroom discipline.
That means judges can dismiss such lawsuits at the beginning of the legal process, rather than forcing teachers or schools to spend time and money defending themselves.
The law also requires the state schools superintendent to notify teachers annually that they have qualified immunity for reasonable acts of discipline, and that the state attorney general may defend teachers against lawsuits involving discipline.
Daniels said he made the bill part of his agenda after visiting numerous schools around the state.
“Gradually I came to understand that they did not resemble the classrooms that I knew or even that I think my children were in, and that a level of disobedience and disorder — even physical abuse of our teachers — had crept in and that folks did not feel confident in dealing with it,” Daniels said at the bill-signing ceremony.
“Education cannot start until disorder stops,” he said.
Attorney General Greg Zoeller said the new law will be a step toward ending frivolous lawsuits in school discipline cases, and that his office will aggressively defend such suits.
Daniels acknowledged on the day after the legislative session that most of his agenda items did not clear the General Assembly, but he did mention that the school discipline bill did pass.
Three of his biggest items — overhauling the structure of local government, having the Legislature take the next step toward amending caps on property tax bills into the state constitution, and a new budget that he considered balanced — did not win approval.
Not passing a two-year budget on time means Daniels will call lawmakers back into special session before the fiscal year ends on June 30 to draft a new spending plan. Daniels has not specifically said when he will call the special session.
