Education

Lawsuit Over Students Speaking Spanish In Class Cost Public School $310,829.96 To Defend

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A former nursing student in Arizona who lost a lawsuit over other students speaking too little English for her liking at Pima Community College caused the school to run up a $310,829.96 legal defense tab.

The verdict in favor of the taxpayer-funded community college came down on Aug. 24 in a Tucson courtroom.

The losing plaintiff, Terri Bennett, had claimed that the students were speaking in Spanish in class and orally translating English to Spanish so excessively that she was failing to learn. She also alleged that a school official illegally suspended her.

Late last week, Pima Community College filed a request seeking complete reimbursement for attorneys’ fees and taxable costs from Bennett and her co-plaintiff, a national lobbying group called ProEnglish.

The events giving rise to Bennett’s lawsuit occurred at PCC’s Desert Vista campus in Tucson in the spring of 2013 during a course called Introduction to Nursing.

Someone — likely Bennett but it’s not clear — asked the Spanish-speaking students “not to speak in Spanish in front of non-Spanish speakers.”

In response, Bennett claimed, the Spanish speakers “laughed” and “mocked” her.

At that point, Bennett, 52, decided that PCC “was hostile” to people who don’t speak Spanish. “She felt ostracized, excluded and segregated from the rest of her class,” according to her lawsuit. (RELATED: Lawsuit: Arizona College Suspended Student Because She Wanted English-Only Classes)

Bennett further alleged that Pima Community College nursing director David Kutzler responded to her complaints by calling her a “bigot and a bitch.”

Kutzler, a retired 20-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force, emphatically denied these allegations and many others. (RELATED: Administrator Answers Charges Of Student Allegedly Booted For Favoring English)

“Terri came to me outraged because two classmates were having private conversations in class, to which she was not a party, in Spanish,” Kutzler explained to The Daily Caller back when Bennett filed her suit. “She demanded that I force students to speak only English to each other.”

Kutzler noted that the same students did well in the class.

“The students sat directly in front of the instructor, who stated that the students did converse in Spanish, but they weren’t translating the lectures, and they weren’t disruptive. Oddly, the two students were able to pass all the exams, which are written in English and proctored with no talking allowed.”

School officials tried several different strategies to make Bennett happy. None worked. Eventually, school officials suspended her. At that time, several campus security officers escorted her off campus.

Bennett has been represented in her lawsuit by John Munger of the Arizona law firm Munger Chadwick. Munger is a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for the 2010 GOP nomination for governor.

Another major figure on Bennett’s side has been Phil Kent, an Atlanta-based activist who is very hostile to illegal immigration. He is a spokesman for a lobbying group called ProEnglish, which wants to make English the sole official language of the United States and which provided seed money for the lawsuit.

ProEnglish’s stated mission is to “work through the courts and the court of public opinion to defend English’s historic role as America’s common, unifying language, and to persuade lawmakers to adopt English as the official language at all levels of government.”

Still photos of a 2013 press conference related to the filing of Bennett’s lawsuit appeared to show Kent sporting a necktie emblazoned with the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy.

The request by Pima Community College for $310,829.96 in legal fees and costs contends that ProEnglish subsidized Bennett’s lawsuit against the public school by using “contributions received for this purpose” and other “unrestricted funds.”

ProEnglish has also stated that it specifically “plans to support” Bennett’s case against the school “during 2015 by underwriting the attorneys’ out-of-pocket expenses at an undeterminable amount.”

In total, ProEnglish spent $708,049.00 in 2013 and $546,818.00 in 2014, the request for legal fees states.

Also, the application for reimbursement observes, the ProEnglish homepage clearly has a ‘donate now’ button soliciting tax-deductible donations to support” Bennett’s case.

“Plaintiff has been able to bring this meritless action with absolutely no economic impact on her,” the request for compensation asserts.

“There is no question that had Plaintiff prevailed on her claims, she would be asking for every dollar that ProEnglish spent to prosecute this litigation.”

NEXT PAGE: Most Of The Money Goes To Attorneys’ Fees

Of the total $310,829.96 amount requested by attorneys for Pima Community College, $298,724.50 is purely attorneys’ fees for four attorneys who represented the taxpayer-funded school throughout many months of pre-trial and trial litigation. The remainder of just over $11,000 is costs for paralegal services, research costs and other costs and fees.

Pima Community College and other community colleges and school districts around the state pay premiums into a nonprofit corporation called the Arizona School Risk Retention Trust, Inc. It’s essentially a specialty insurance pool that foots the legal defense bill when member institutions get sued. When necessary, the corporation also pays various awards and settlements resulting from lawsuits.

Under Arizona law, courts may award winning litigants — both plaintiffs and defendants — reasonable attorneys’ fees “to mitigate the burden of the expense of litigation” in certain situations.

Bennett’s lawsuit against Pima Community College relied largely on Article 28 of Arizona’s state constitution, which establishes English as “the official language of the state.” Section 3 states: “A person shall not be discriminated against or penalized in any way because the person uses or attempts to use English in public or private communication.”

No part of the article prohibits people from speaking languages other than English in their own private communication.

Pima Community College is a large school with roughly 30,000 total students enrolled across a half dozen campuses. Statistics show that 38 percent of students identify as “Latino/Hispanic.”

During a pretrial deposition, Bennett indicated that she “did very well in medical sales” at some point in her life and had “lots of stock and saved lots of money.”

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