Re: Kid got hurt messin around at school
My suggestion to the teachers at your wife's school, is that they ask their principal if he understands the significance and penalties involved in "obstruction of justice." Telling an employee that they may not report a crime is about as dumb as it gets. Next time, forget telling him that he can't control you in that regard - tell him that he has zero authority to tell anyone not to report a crime.
As for the workers comp, my guess is that the school made some argument that the teacher should not have involved herself in breaking up a fight. The position would have most likely been along the lines of deviating from her job description, violating some policy not to take such action, etc.
On the other hand, if teachers at the school routinely break up fights and management knows that, regardless of what is in an employee manual or other documentation, there would likely be a good case for the injury to be considered to be work related. I suppose that would also be true if the teacher could demonstrate that significant injury would have occured, had she not broken the fight up.
One of the reasons that employers engage in this knid of nonsense, is because their insurers will sometimes tell them things that are simply incorrect. I had such a situation while running the business operations of a company once. I won't bore you with the details, but we had a new WC insurer try to get us to do something that was clearly a bad idea. In their attempt, they quoted a Louisiana law in a way that it simply did not apply. Had we done what they wanted, we would have violated a number of Federal laws and standards, and we would have opened ourselves up to major lawsuits.
I told the WC insurer that we would not comply and I spelled out the reason why. I never heard another peep from them on the matter and they never tried to mess with us in any way. Simply put, they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar and they knew it.
