Tort Reform in California: Do it for the Kids
August 19, 2010
California is facing a $19 billion budget hole this year and the possibility of (once again) issuing IOUs instead of paychecks to state workers. Furloughs may soon be back en vogue, and the state’s debt rating is flirting with junk status. No sacred cows are being spared with proposals to slash spending on everything from schools to health care services.
But there are some California workers who are doing very well, thank you. You guessed it: trial lawyers.
Our friends at California Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse are out with a new study that examines the staggering amount of money that California public school districts are spending each year on litigation. The study, “Lessons in Lawsuits: The Impact of Litigation on California’s Schools,” examines three years’ worth of legal costs at 12 California public school districts - including verdicts, settlements and lawyer fees.
The result? Litigation cost those 12 districts nearly $100 million over three years. Tom Scott, CALA’s executive director, said that this money could have “paid the salaries of more than 1,530 teachers, purchased nearly 600 new school buses, bought more than 1.1 million school desks or purchased 246,762 desktop computer packages.”
Of course all these whopping legal costs have a dire impact on the education of California’s children. Here’s an excerpt from the report:
“In June, the state Department of Education identified a record 174 of California’s school districts that were financially troubled, up 38 percent from January. Across the state, tens of thousands of teachers were pink-slipped this year, told the funding for their positions – to educate the next generation of Californians – was unavailable. In Los Angeles, the L.A. Unified School District (LAUSD) has cut disabled children’s programs, including shutting down 200 classrooms and an entire campus dedicated to serving the disabled and reducing busing for these students. The Kern High School District (HSD) was forced to auction off and recycle items like buses and student desks to raise money for its general fund. Travel for athletic teams and field trips also have been eliminated.”
Those students in Kern County, CA might be interested to know that while they were seeing their desks auctioned off, the district was spending $2.3 million defending against lawsuits.
Sounds like a healthy dose of legal reform would be a good first step toward closing the yawning budget gap in the Golden State.