City looks to end Mission Hill mess
Motion to dismiss lawsuit over school
The city filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit alleging the district and city’s liability for bullying and sexual abuse at the nowshuttered Mission Hill K-8 Pilot School, pushing back on claims of Title IX and ADA violations and placing blame largely within the school administration.
“The City cannot be held vicariously liable … for the actions of their non-policymaking employees, such as (former Mission Hill principal Ayla Gavins),” the city’s document detailing the motion to dismiss states.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court against BPS, Gavins and two other former educators at the school last May by two families of students.
The case outlines some of the many graphic allegations of bullying and sexual abuse to come out of the school, including a first-grader being stabbed in the face with a pencil and Gavins allegedly telling a parent she “didn’t know what she wanted her to do” about her child’s sexual and physical abuse on school grounds.
The lawsuit closely followed the first release of a three-part report commissioned by the district from the Hinkley Allen firm in 2022, which detailed how school, district and city officials failed to keep students safe at every level. After the first report was released the school was officially closed in June.
The motion document filed Tuesday directly references the report’s findings, saying “the Hinckley Allen Report found in 2022 the Mission Hill School and Gavins, not the Boston Public Schools, had created and fostered a culture of minimizing bullying complaints and sexualized conduct of students.”
Though the report highlights structural issues like turnover and holes in oversight in BPS, it also cites times district employees at the “highest levels” of leadership were made aware of the disturbing complaints at the school and failed to take action.
The district settled a previous lawsuit with five families alleging misconduct at the Mission Hill school for $650,000 in 2021.
The motion to dismiss argues this case is different than the previously settled case in that it does not meet the “state-created danger claim.”
While the prior case included “allegations that school officials suppressed reports of sexual assault from the Department of Children and Families and fired a teacher in retaliation for reporting such conduct to DCF, here there are no allegations that the City took affirmative steps to enhance the danger to the Plaintiffs,” the document reads.
The motion says the case against BPS is based on a failure to report, investigate or generally prevent, rather than active misconduct.
It was Gavins, the motion emphasizes, who “failed to document, report and address bullying” and follow BPS policies and state law “in an ill-conceived effort to disrupt the schoolto-prison pipeline for students of color.”
The motion also makes the case the alleged student-on-student sexual harassment — instances including calling an elementary student gendered slurs, pulling down her pants and a male student exposing himself to her — do not meet the “high bar” of a Title IX claim and do not show the city was “deliberately indifferent” to severe and pervasive conduct.
Likewise, the district says the ADA and Rehab Act claims — relating to special education requirements — should be tossed because parents did not “exhaust all administrative remedies.”
The date for a hearing on the motion to dismiss has not yet been released.