Bullying Trial Findings:
School Acted Appropriately

By Euan Bear

     A jury in Caledonia Superior Court found that school officials at the St. Johnsbury middle school acted appropriately in response to reports of sexual harassment of a male student. The jury reached its finding after about two hours of deliberation following a 5-day trial.
      The lawsuit against the school was filed by Linda Berthiaume, who had charged that the school had failed to protect her son, Nicholas Spaziani, from harassment on the bus and in his home room by classmates who assumed he was gay. Berthiaume was reported to have sought $1 million in damages.
      In a brief statement, plaintiff’s lawyer Eileen Blackwood, of Burlington, said that the jury found that the boy had been harassed, but that the school had responded appropriately to acts she had earlier characterized as more than “just harmless teasing.” In her opening statement, Blackwood had outlined the effects of the harassment on Spaziani as severe enough that the boy threatened to kill himself.
      Defendants’ lawyer Pietro Lyn, representing the school district and three officials being sued, maintained successfully that the school responded “every single time a complaint was made.” Administrators spoke to the harassers and sent letters home to their parents. Eventually, the four worst offenders were suspended when Spaziani was in his last year of middle school.