Young children get on a school bus.
JACKSONVILLE – The family of a Florida teenager who was allegedly sexually assaulted while aboard a school bus contracted by Duval County Public Schools has filed a lawsuit against the school system, school officials, and bus company.
Plaintiff Jane Doe was a ninth-grade student at Stanton College Preparatory School, a highly-selective public magnet school that offers Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses in Jacksonville, in 2024.
She proceeds by pseudonym because she is a minor and the victim of sexual assault, the 42-page complaint states. Her parent also uses a “John Doe” pseudonym, and seeks to seal and restrict identifying information.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Jacksonville Division.
The named defendants include: Dr. Christopher Bernier, DCPS superintendent; Tamla Simmons, a Title IX investigator for DCPS and vice principal at SCPS; Brian Jefferson, a school resource officer; Sade Casper-Reynolds, dean at SCPS; Student Transportation of America Inc., the company that provides transportation services to DCPS under contract; and STA bus driver James Roe, whose name is unknown and will be amended once known.
“Plaintiff alleges that the District’s institutional interest in protecting school and District reputations contributed to the minimization, misclassification, and inadequate remediation of the reported sexual misconduct described below,” the complaint states.
“After Plaintiff reported the assaults, Defendants allegedly minimized her report, delayed or restricted access to critical evidence, failed to provide victim-centered supportive measures, and shifted burdens onto Plaintiff rather than the perpetrator.”
According to the filing, the perpetrator, a male student, subjected Jane Doe to “escalating sexual harassment” aboard the school bus for several weeks in September 2024.
Then, on September 30, 2024, the perpetrator allegedly subjected her to a “prolonged” sexual assault aboard the school bus – the third and “most egregious” of incidents, she claims.
The plaintiff contends that surveillance footage – as viewed by her family – shows that the bus driver looked in the interior mirror more than once and glanced toward the perpetrator at least once. She claims the footage also shows the driver “looked directly at the perpetrator” while the assault was ongoing.
“But for the bus driver’s failure to monitor the bus and intervene after directly engaging with and looking at the perpetrator during the assault, and after having a clear and unobstructed view of him with a turn of the head, the assault would not have occurred, would have been interrupted sooner, or would have been materially less severe,” the complaint states.
The plaintiff alleges footage from the bus camera was not retrieved until mid-November 2024. And even then, the defendants permitted her family to view the footage only once – and in the presence of two law enforcement officers, she claims.
The plaintiff’s family contends the “loss, nonproduction, delayed retrieval, restricted viewing, or absence of preservation records” also prejudiced her ability to prove the full duration of the assault, the bus driver’s opportunity to observe and intervene, the timing and adequacy of the defendants’ response, and the defendants’ handling of her report.
Doe claims the defendants also treated the educational impact of the assault as an academic-performance issue rather than a Title IX emergency requiring supportive measures and remediation.
She alleges they also failed to report her abuse – since she is a minor – to the Florida Department of Children and Families as required by Florida law.
Instead, school officials imposed a “stay away agreement” and other restrictions on her.
She was allegedly required to sit at the front of the bus, in the area where the alleged assault occurred; was asked each day if she would be riding the bus; was required to report to a dean each school day; and was excluded from common areas at the school.
“These measures singled Plaintiff out before other students and recast punitive restrictions as supportive procedures,” her lawsuit states.
On Nov. 13, 2024, the plaintiff’s parents – fearing the school was building a disciplinary case against their daughter in retaliation for her reporting – withdrew Doe from SCPS and enrolled her in Florida Virtual School.
In the lawsuit, they contend DCPS had notice of prior sexually inappropriate conduct by the perpetrator, but permitted him “continued unsupervised access” to female students.
They argue DCPS failed to implement adequate policies, training, supervision, documentation controls, evidence-preservation procedures, and corrective measures reasonably calculated to prevent those failures from recurring in their daughter’s case.
The plaintiff seeks compensatory and punitive damages, attorneys’ fees, and sanctions for the failure to preserve evidence.
She also seeks declaratory and injunctive relief requiring DCPS to adopt and implement: adequate Title IX compliance procedures, mandatory-reporting protocols, school-safety incident classification and reporting procedures, contractor-oversight and bus-surveillance preservation requirements applicable to DCPS and its transportation contractors, supportive-measure procedures, student-safety training and supervision, and revisions to any policy or practice that “chills student reporting of sexual misconduct or places retaliatory burdens on reporting students.”
Moser Law PLLC in St. Augustine, Florida, is representing the plaintiff in the case.
