School Bully Injury Compensation Claim Settled Against School

A school district in New Jersey has agreed to pay 4.2 million dollars in school bully injury compensation after allegedly failing to comply with State anti-bullying laws and protect one of its students from the threat of injury.

Sawyer Rosenstein of Woodland Park, New Jersey, was just twelve years of age in May 2006 when a known bully at the Eric Smith Middle School punched him in the abdomen, causing a clot to develop in the artery that supplies blood to the spine and paralysing Sawyer from the waist down.

In a subsequent claim for school bully injury compensation against the Ramsey School District, Sawyer´s parents alleged that his attacker had a history of violent tendencies and cited an incident that had occurred a year earlier when the bully had punched another student in the face on the school bus.

They claimed that school officials kept no record of the incident nor subjected the boy to any discipline, and supported their allegations with an email that had been sent to Sawyer´s guidance counsellor just three months before the attack asking for help to deal with the bullying he was already experiencing.

In the email Sawyer wrote “I would like to let you know that the bullying has increased. I would like to figure out some coping mechanisms to deal with these situations, and I would just like to put this on file so if something happens again, we can show that there was past bullying situations.”

After months of negotiations, the 4.2 million dollar settlement of Sawyer´s school bully injury compensation claim was made in an out-of-court agreement without admission of liability. Sawyer now attends Syracuse University where he is a freshman majoring in communication.