In Achay v. Huntington Beach Union High School Dist., published June 28, 2022, the Fourth District Court of Appeal, Division 3 reversed summary judgment for the defendant school district. The plaintiff, a 10th grader, was on the school track team. Her last class ended at 2:30 p.m. Between 2:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., the public could come onto campus freely. The plaintiff usually had track practice on campus between 3-5:30 p.m. One day, track practice ended at 4:30 p.m. The plaintiff and a friend walked to a nearby Starbucks at left at 5:00 p.m. They walked back to campus to retrieve their schoolbooks from the girls' locker room. As they walked back, they encountered a stranger on roller blades, who taunted them. When they returned to the school campus at 5:15 p.m., the stranger was in the parking lot, talking with students. The students went to the locker room, which was customarily not locked until 6 p.m. They went to an inner locker room with a lockable door, because they did not feel safe. Eventually, they went to the school parking lot to be picked up by the plaintiff's friend's mother. They passed the school swimming pool where practice was taking place. After they passed the pool, the stranger roller bladed behind the plaintiff and stabbed her in the back, seriously injuring her. The plaintiff sued the school for breaching a duty to provide security for students. The district moved for summary judgment on the grounds that the school district owed her no duty of care, and that there was no causal connection between the alleged negligence and the swift, unpredictable attack. The trial court granted summary judgment.
The appellate court held that the school district owed the plaintiff a duty of care. School personnel owe students under their supervision a protective duty of ordinary care, including the duty to use reasonable measures to protect students from foreseeable injury at the hands of third parties. Schools have a general duty to supervise the conduct of children on school grounds during school activities. The appellate court ruled that the District owed the plaintiff a duty of care because she was stabbed while she was on campus during school-related activities, after-school sports. The district argued its duty to protect the student ended when her track practice was over and she left campus for 45 minutes. But the incident occurred on school grounds, during ongoing after school sports activities (the swim practice was ongoing nearby). That she left campus briefly and returned to be picked up made no difference. Because the plaintiff's track practice usually lasted until 5:30 p.m. and the locker room was open until 6:00 p.m., it was reasonably foreseeable that a student would leave campus briefly, return to pick up schoolbooks, and walk to the school parking lot to be picked up. All was part of the school activity. As for causation, the facts that the campus was open after 2:30 p.m., after-school activities continued on campus after that, and the plaintiff and her friend were fearful about the assailant being on campus raised a triable issue of fact on whether the presence of security the girls could have summoned would have prevented the attack.