Pratt v. Robinson

• Decision Date: 13 May 1976
• Citation: 39 N.Y.2d 554,384 N.Y.S.2d 749,349 N.E.2d 849
• Parties: , 349 N.E.2d 849 Lorraine PRATT, by her father and natural guardian, Herbert Pratt, et al., Appellants, v. Melford D. ROBINSON et al., Respondents.
• Court: New York Court of Appeals Court of Appeals

Page 749

384 N.Y.S.2d 749

39 N.Y.2d 554, 349 N.E.2d 849

Lorraine PRATT, by her father and natural guardian, Herbert Pratt, et al., Appellants, v. Melford D. ROBINSON et al., Respondents.

Court of Appeals of New York.

May 13, 1976.

Jay M. Friedman and Reynolds E. Hahn, Rochester, for appellants.

Louis N. Kash, Corp. Counsel, James Charles Alaimo and Brian J. Burroughs, Rochester, for City of Rochester and another, respondents.

Robert J. Hirsch, Rochester, for City Lines Management Corp., respondent.

FUCHSBERG, Justice.

Seven-year-old Lorraine Pratt, who was on her way home from school, sustained substantial injuries when she was struck by a truck while crossing Plymouth Avenue South at Columbia Avenue in the City of Rochester. She had alighted without misadventure from an eastbound school bus at its regular bus stop on the sidewalk of Columbia Avenue at its intersection with Seward Street. Before reaching the point of the accident, as she usually did she had then walked last along the Columbia Avenue sidewalk in the company of her 9- and 13-year-old brothers for a distance of three short city blocks, during which, under the eyes of her siblings, she had crossed two intersecting streets.

The Plymouth Avenue intersection, where Lorraine was struck is a heavily trafficked one. From there she still had about two more blocks to go before reaching the Pratt family home on Edith Street. Her two brothers, as her parents had instructed them to do, would usually take her by the hand on crossing the intersection. On this occasion, however, the boys proceeded to cross without observing whether she was still with them and, once they were on the other side, having noticed for the first time that she had become separated from them and had lagged behind, they beckoned to her to cross over too. It was while she was doing so that she was hit.

Shortly after the truck injured the plaintiff, and prior to trial, her claim against the driver and owner of the vehicle was settled for the full amount of its insurance coverage, which was only in the statutory minimum limit of $10,000. That is where the case before us begins, the plaintiff and her parents having then proceeded with this suit against the city, the school district and the bus company. In effect, the theory of their action is that the location of the school bus stop was negligently planned. They do not assert that the place chosen for the actual bus stop, Columbia Avenue and Seward Street, is unsafe in any way, but only that the stop should have been located, instead, at a point which would have obviated the need for the child to cross Plymouth Avenue South three blocks later on foot.

In due course, the case came up for trial before a jury. However, at the end of the plaintiffs' proof, the Justice who presided dismissed the complaint against the city and the bus company for failure to make out a prima facie case. At the end of all of the proof, he dismissed the complaint against the school district for the same reason. The Appellate Division, with two Justices dissenting, affirmed the order and judgment entered on the dismissals. Because of the division in the court below, this appeal is now before us as a matter of right pursuant to CPLR 5601 (subd. (a), par. (i)).

The bus route here had been established by the school district as an accommodation to the children whom it served. Its use was not compulsory. It came into existence when the school district instituted an enrollment plan, under which children could, at the option of their parents, attend schools other than the neighborhood ones closest to them. Obviously, the busing program was intended to make participation in the plan, for those who wished to avail themselves of it, easier.

Plaintiffs' parents having availed themselves of the enrollment plan by transferring Lorraine from school No. 2, which she had attended the year before, to school No. 21, which was farther from their home, also elected to take advantage of the busing program with the full knowledge of the time schedule and location of the bus stops, including the one here, the closest to them. They also knew that no arrangements were offered for transporting the children from their homes to the bus stops and vice versa. It was up to the parents and children to handle that on their own, and they could do so in any one of the many possible ways that suited them.

For instance, if the parents wished, they could have their children walk the distance, either alone or in custody of others. They could accompany the children personally. They could, if they so desired, transport the children by automobile, whether through the kind of pooling arrangement which parents commonly work out or individually, the latter method being the one that the plaintiff's father used to get her to the bus stop in the morning. Or they could, of course, bypass the bus entirely and arrange for the children to get to the school directly. With respect to all such alternatives, the child and the parents were in precisely the same position as if the school itself, rather than the bus stop, was located at the corner of Columbia and Seward and no busing was provided at all.

Accommodation of the plaintiffs' desire for a bus stop closer to their home would have required the school district to reroute its bus, which normally proceeded along a street named Bronson Avenue, in order to reach its next stop, which was a goodly distance from the plaintiffs' home. As it happens, owing to the temporary closure of Bronson Avenue to traffic at the time of this accident, the bus in fact followed a detour which, after it left its scheduled stop at Columbia and Seward, took it east on Columbia and then north on Plymouth, exactly parallel to the child's walking route to the point where she would turn down Edith Street away from Plymouth. It also happens that all eight children who during this particular term of school used the bus stop at Columbia Avenue and Seward Street lived east of Plymouth Avenue. We do not believe these coincidences, which, incidentally, do not form the basis of plaintiffs' claim, affect the situation.

Moreover, we do observe that, as a practical matter, to have relocated plaintiffs' bus stop along the route of the detour on Plymouth Avenue, especially on a temporary basis, could have wrought havoc with the entire busing program, by altering the scheduled time of all subsequent stops on very short notice to parents or others in the habit of meeting the bus so that they could, in turn, rearrange their schedules, and by requiring the district to reassess such other factors as costs, the terms of the contract with the bus company, the safety of the new stop, and the possible obstruction of traffic caused by locating the stop on a far busier roadway. And, incidentally, a change would not have obviated the need to cross to take the bus in the morning when it would be headed to rather than from the school.

In any event, the gravamen of the issue before us is whether it was negligent for the school district to have located its bus stop so that the plaintiff child was required to cross a dangerous intersection blocks away while en route home.

Negligence of the sort here alleged can only be found if there existed a duty on the part of the school district to transport the plaintiff to a location from which she could walk home without crossing any dangerous streets on the way. Such a duty could arise in a number of ways, each of which we shall examine.

The first of these would be the imposition of such a duty by the Legislature. The relevant State statute, pursuant to which local school districts are authorized to conduct busing programs, is section 3635 of the Education Law. That statute imposes no duty on a city school district to bus any child. It specifies only that, where such busing is provided, it must be made available to all eligible children 'equally'. This conditional mandate has been interpreted to mean that all children who live the same distance from the school must be offered busing services; it does not refer to any obligation to consider the relative hazards in the paths of different children (see 12 Ed.Dept.Rep. 148, 161, 224; 10 Ed.Dept.Rep. 49; 8 Ed.Dept.Rep. 213; Matter of Studley v. Allen, 24 A.D.2d 678, 261 N.Y.S.2d 138; see, also, Ossant v. Millard, 72 Misc.2d 384, 339 N.Y.S.2d 163).

As the court in the Studley case put it (24 A.D.2d p. 678, 261 N.Y.S.2d p. 139), 'the legislative yardstick is distance, which is, objectively, readily ascertainable, and not hazard which involves a myriad of factors'. As that court further noted, the statutory language indicates that 'the Legislature 'has not completely transferred to school districts the duty of transporting every pupil" (Id., citing the unpublished opinion at Nisi prius). Finally, we note that subdivision 1 of section 3635 specifically states that 'Nothing contained in this subdivision * * * shall be deemed to require a school district (i) to furnish transportation to a child directly to or from his home.' We conclude that the statute itself furnishes no basis upon which to posit a duty on the part of the school district to bus the plaintiff closer to her home solely in order to avoid a hazard in the nature of a heavily traveled crossway located several blocks away from the designated bus stop.

Nor does the common-law custodial duty of a school toward its pupils supply any basis for liability here. It is clear that a school district does have a special relationship to its students, as that term is used in the negligence context, a relationship analogous to that between carriers and their passengers or innkeepers and their guests (Restatement, Torts 2d, § 315, subd. (b); § 320). This special duty owed to students requires a school to act when a child, While in its charge, is threatened by the negligence of a third party, and it must make reasonable efforts to anticipate such threats (§ 320). If,...