Ayon v. Austin Independent School District
What’s at stake: Whether a school district is liable when it fails to take obvious steps to prevent sexual abuse.
Summary: Crystal Ayon’s five-year-old daughter was sexually abused by her school bus driver for months. Crystal noticed something was wrong when the bus began to drop her daughter off a half hour late, but when she reported it to the school, the school blamed the weather. By the time Crystal’s daughter told her about the abuse, it had already continued for months.
Unbeknownst to Crystal, this was not a new problem: at least four other employees in the same school district had abused students in the past five years, and one of them was another bus driver. Still, the school failed to take obvious steps to prevent more abuse, according to Crystal’s lawsuit. It routinely allowed bus monitors to leave students alone with drivers for extended periods. And school policy prohibited employees from checking the security cameras until someone reported an incident. If the school had changed these policies before, it likely would have prevented Crystal’s daughter’s sexual abuse.
Crystal sued the school district in federal court in Austin, Texas. She claimed that the school violated the U.S. Constitution and Title IX, a law that bans sex discrimination in schools. But the court dismissed the case, ruling that the school was not responsible for failing to prevent the abuse. Crystal appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. On July 3, 2024, we filed an amicus brief to support Crystal’s appeal.
Core legal question: Does a school violate federal law when it fails to take obvious steps to prevent sexual abuse? In this case, the district court held that students cannot sue under Title IX when the school fails to act address a “heightened risk” of sexual abuse by staff members; instead, the court suggested, they are only liable when the same perpetrator already abused some else. Our brief explains why that’s wrong: Title IX holds schools responsible when they fail to take obvious to take common-sense precautions to detect and prevent abuse, and Crystal presented enough evidence to show that’s what happened here.