The Poudre School District in Fort Collins is shelling out a whopping $16.2 million to settle with the families of 10 children who accused a former employee of abuse. This juicy payment was revealed on Wednesday, a whole year after Tyler Zanella, a former paraprofessional for the district, got slapped with a sentence of over 12 years for assaulting disabled students on school buses. Talk about a wild ride, huh?
According to the families’ attorney, David Lane, this whole situation is just mind-boggling. He said, “It is utterly incomprehensible how a school district could allow a convicted child abuser to have access to utterly helpless children in this situation.” I mean, who dropped the ball here? Ultimately, this whole mess is gonna end up costing the taxpayers millions of dollars, and these poor innocent children have been seriously messed up by it all.
Zanella’s troubles started in May 2023 when he was arrested after surveillance footage caught him smacking a disabled student on a school bus. That’s just low, man. Initially facing a whopping 160 charges of child abuse, harassment, and assault, he decided to plead guilty to assault on an at-risk person, harassment, and child abuse. The Poudre School District has had to cough up almost $2 million to beef up safety measures since Zanella’s arrest, including things like revising hiring practices, installing cameras on all buses, hiring a transportation manager for students with disabilities, and training staff on trauma-informed care, mandatory reporting, and behavior management. They’re really going all out, huh?
The school board gave the thumbs up for the settlement during a meeting on Tuesday. The bulk of the money will be covered by Poudre’s insurance company, but $6.2 million will be coming straight out of the district’s pockets. Ouch. Despite all this drama, school board president Kristen Draper is looking on the bright side. She said, “While these incidents are a painful chapter in our history, they are also a catalyst for important and necessary improvements.” Well, at least they’re trying to learn from their mistakes, right?
Zanella was hired back in 2022 to assist autistic elementary-aged children on the bus. Turns out, the district knew he had pleaded guilty to child abuse back in 2012. Yikes. The families’ lawsuit, filed in 2023, claimed that videos caught Zanella smashing a child’s head into a bus window and making fun of the poor kid. There were also clips of him hitting other children on the bus. These kids were all between 6 and 11 years old at the time. Just heartbreaking stuff.
So there you have it, folks. The Poudre School District is forking over a crazy amount of cash to make up for their massive blunder. Let’s hope they’ve learned their lesson and will do better in the future. But hey, who am I kidding? It’s not like we haven’t seen this kind of thing happen before, right? Just another day in the world of education, I guess.
