The potentially deadly ineptitude of Denver Public Schools’ approach to safety under the current regime is laid bare in a searing ruling issued this week by a federal judge in the lawsuit of an East High School dean shot inside the school by a student three years ago.
U.S. District Court Judge Gordon P. Gallagher allowed major portions of Eric Sinclair’s lawsuit against DPS to proceed, in part because the complaint meets a difficult standard by demonstrating that the school district’s “shocking disregard” for the risk posed by the student is “plausibly conscience shocking.”
The facts of the case are well known, but the ruling revealed new details. Here is a summary from a Chalkbeat article:
The shooter, Austin Lyle, had enrolled at East High in January 2023 because he was living in the school’s boundary. He’d previously been expelled from Overland High School in Aurora “after police found an AR-15 assault rifle, two fully loaded magazines, a zip-lock bag with spent shells, boxes of ammunition, and a silencer in his bedroom,” the ruling says. Overland is part of the Cherry Creek School District.
After Lyle started at East High, an assistant principal, Shawne Anderson, created a safety plan that required Lyle to verbally check in with Anderson each day, the ruling says.
The check-ins escalated to a daily backpack search after another student reported what appeared to be a gun in Lyle’s pocket on March 2. When a campus security guard tried to search Lyle, he “became agitated and fled the school,” according to the ruling. Lyle’s father refused to let police search his son’s bedroom.
On March 23, Anderson didn’t respond to radio calls to search Lyle’s backpack. Sinclair, who didn’t know about Lyle’s history with guns, offered to do the search instead, according to the ruling. He noticed a bulge in the front pocket of Lyle’s hooded sweatshirt.
Lyle implied it was a phone and “grabbed Mr. Sinclair’s hand and put it on the outside of the hoodie, saying ‘here, touch it,’” the ruling says. “Upon feeling the object, Mr. Sinclair immediately knew it was a gun and became alarmed.”
Hundreds of students were across the hall at a school assembly. When Lyle tried to leave the office where Sinclair was searching him, Sinclair blocked the exit and Lyle pulled a gun.
Sinclair radioed for help and Mason responded, the ruling says. Lyle then fired multiple shots at Sinclair, hitting him in the abdomen, chest, and thigh. He also shot Mason.
Gallagher wrote in his ruling that
“While conscience shocking is undoubtedly a difficult standard to satisfy, the Court finds that Mr. Sinclair has pleaded facts sufficient to support his allegation that DPS’s conduct is conscience shocking and to survive a motion to dismiss. Viewing DPS’s conduct in total and viewing the facts in a light most favorable to Mr. Sinclair, DPS appears to have exhibited a shocking disregard for the risk (Lyle) posed to an entire school full of children, faculty, and staff – as well as to himself.”
Lyle committed suicide hours after the shooting.
Gallagher also wrote:
“In light of the information Mr. Sinclair provides regarding the rise of gun possession in Colorado schools, the death of Luis Garcia by gun violence in front of East High School weeks earlier A.L.’s history at Overland High School, and DPS’s decision to remove the (School Resource Officers), Mr. Sinclair has shown that Defendants seem to have knowingly opened the door for a mass shooting and/or outbreak of gun violence at East High School. This conduct is illogical, baffling, and plausibly conscience shocking.”
The lawsuit is in its early stages and it is conceivable that new facts will come to light. But in a statement issued after the ruling, DPS seemed to be putting forth a legalistic rather than a fact-based response to Sinclair’s allegations.
“Denver Public Schools is confident that the evidence will demonstrate that its actions in this case were consistent with legal requirements and looks forward to the opportunity to present its arguments in court in the near future,” the statement said in part.
Let’s get out of those legalistic weeds for a moment and ponder this line, penned by the judge:
“It is not hard to imagine the terror that students and the parents of other students at East High School would have felt if they had known of (the) chain of events” that led up to the shootings.
Is there any less reason to be alarmed today?
Although school resource officers were returned to some schools in the wake of the East shootings, the upside-down decision-making that went into allowing Lyle to attend East should give DPS parents pause.
Has anything changed in terms of erring on the side of allowing just about any student, regardless of a violent history, into any school?
While the East shootings case is undoubtedly the most serious in terms of consequences, DPS is defending itself in other lawsuits caused by its own “baffling” behavior. Former McAuliffe International Principal Kurt Dennis’s defamation lawsuit is winding its way through the system, with depositions ongoing.
And DPS parent Kristen Fry’s defamation lawsuit is also proceeding. Combined, these three cases could potentially cost the district tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money.
School districts get sued frequently, and often speciously. But these three cases all seem strong, and all of them were caused by actions and incidents that were entirely avoidable.
Unfortunately, we seem to live in an age where leaders at the highest levels are no longer accountable for even their most egregious actions.
Perhaps the eventual resolution of one or more of these lawsuits will change that, at least as far as DPS is concerned.
