When Colorado lawmakers passed a law in 2015 allowing school districts to be held liable for school shootings, they intended to give both staff and students the opportunity to sue.
"Should our schools have a duty to protect our kids and those who work there? Should our schools provide "reasonable care"? Senate Bill 213 says yes," former state Sen. Bill Cadman said at a 2015 hearing on the bill that created the Claire Davis School Safety Act, named after a Colorado student who was killed in a school shooting.
But more than a decade later, it's not clear whether the law applies to school staff. Two deans who were shot and injured by a student at Denver's East High School in 2023 are believed to be the first staff members to file lawsuits. Last month, a judge in one of the cases threw out the Claire Davis claim, spotlighting that the law may contain an unintended loophole.
Colorado has a high-profile history with school violence dating back to the deadly mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. The parents and classmates of Claire Davis, who was shot by a fellow student at Arapahoe High School in Littleton in 2013, advocated for the bill that bears her name in the hopes that it would curb the violence.
"If there is any state in the country that should be getting this issue right, that has the experience to help us get this right, it should be Colorado," former state Sen. Andy Kerr said in 2015.
But in removing the immunity provisions in state law that protected school districts from lawsuits and clearing the way for staff members who are seriously assaulted to sue, it appears lawmakers may have overlooked a hurdle: the state's Workers' Compensation Act.
In a March ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Gordon P. Gallagher ruled that former East High dean Eric Sinclair can't sue Denver Public Schools under the Claire Davis law. The law allows individual victims to collect up to $505,000 and multiple victims to split a total of $1,421,000.
Even though Sinclair's attorneys argued that blocking the former dean from suing under the Claire Davis law would make the law "meaningless or absurd" to school staff, the judge was not convinced. Because Sinclair was injured on the job, Gallager ruled that his claims fall under the state's Workers' Compensation Act.
"Mr. Sinclair would not have been injured but for the fact that he was engaged in employment-related duties," Gallagher wrote.
Sinclair's attorneys declined to comment for this story.
Did state lawmakers foresee this problem?
Workers' compensation doesn't appear to have come up when state lawmakers were debating whether to enact the Claire Davis law. Instead, much of the discussion focused on protecting students and ensuring that victims' families had access to information about what happened.
That discussion was likely driven by Davis' death. The 17-year-old was shot in the head while she sat on a bench eating a cookie between classes. The 18-year-old student who shot her had exhibited threatening behavior and said he wanted to kill his debate coach.
At the time the bill was being debated, Davis' parents were in the midst of arbitration with the Littleton school district to gain access to information about the circumstances surrounding her death. In return, the Davises agreed not to sue.
"Please don't make the next mother beg for answers as to why her child was killed in a public school in the state of Colorado," Claire's mother, Desiree Davis, told lawmakers in 2015.
Even though the scenario of teachers and other school staff being shot didn't come up much in the debate, the law clearly intends to protect them. It says school districts and charter schools have a duty to exercise reasonable care to protect "students, faculty and staff" from reasonably foreseeable acts of violence, including murder and first degree assault.
Former state Sen. Mark Scheffel, who co-sponsored the bill, said faculty and staff were purposely included. But he said he doesn't remember any discussions about how the law would interact with workers' compensation, likely because the issue wasn't top-of-mind at the time.
"In the testimony and the committees that followed, all of the discussion did tend to center around students," Scheffel said in an interview this week.
Joe Goldhammer, an adjunct professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and a longtime labor law attorney, said that if state lawmakers wanted to allow school staff to essentially double dip by getting hundreds of thousands in damages on top of their workers' compensation money, they should have made that clear in the bill.
Cadman, the other co-sponsor of the bill, declined to comment for this story. So did the Colorado Attorney General's Office. Several local and national school safety and gun violence prevention experts said they haven't followed the implementation of the law.
Scheffel said he'd be hesitant to encourage state lawmakers to tweak the law just yet, after only one ruling in one lawsuit. He said the law was "delicately drafted" with input from the Davis family, and he wouldn't want any changes to create more unintended consequences.
"Working on this bill was one of the more gratifying moments I had as a senator," said Scheffel, who served in the state legislature for eight years. "It was heartbreaking and gratifying to try to wrap our brain around something we thought would make a difference."
Few lawsuits have been filed under the law
Few lawsuits have been filed under the Claire Davis law, and it's not clear how many have resulted in monetary damages.
The family of Kendrick Castillo, an 18-year-old student killed in a 2019 school shooting, sued under the law and collected $387,000 from the charter school their son attended, according to court documents. Kendrick died after he lunged at a fellow student who had pulled a gun in class at STEM School Highlands Ranch.
But the courts denied the Castillos part of what they wanted: a jury trial and public airing of the facts. The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled last year that a trial wasn't necessary because the family had already collected the maximum amount of money allowable under the Claire Davis law. The school had deposited that sum in the court's registry early in the case.
Other lawsuits filed under the Claire Davis law have been dismissed.
They include a lawsuit filed by the family of Luis Garcia, who sued Denver Public Schools after Luis was fatally shot while sitting in his car outside of Denver's East High School in 2023. A judge dismissed the lawsuit because she found that Luis, a 16-year-old junior at East, was not killed on school grounds because his car was parked on a public street.
Attorney Igor Raykin said several of the lawsuits he's filed under the Claire Davis law have also been dismissed. His cases mostly involved bullying, including one where a student with autism was allegedly pushed down a flight of stairs by a classmate. All but two of the handful of lawsuits Raykin has filed have been thrown out, he said. The other two are ongoing.
"It is still very, very difficult to sue a school for an injury to a child at the school," Raykin said. "This is one of the things that pisses me off. Schools are going around and saying, "We're going to get sued, and this is awful." No. It is still really hard to sue school districts under state law."
That's not to say the Claire Davis law hasn't had any effect. School safety experts say that in the wake of the law, schools sharply increased how often they conduct threat assessments to determine whether a student's threats are credible and how the school should intervene.
Chris Harms, director of the Colorado Office of School Safety, said the office provided about 20 threat assessment workshops to school districts in the six years before the Claire Davis law was passed. In the 10 years since, it has done more than 200.
Harms declined an interview for this story. But she said by email that "even if (the law) hasn't resulted in successful lawsuits, it has certainly resulted in trained threat assessment teams in our schools, which we believe has prevented targeted violence."
Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.
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