(Quebec) The parents of a Quebec teenager who got a zero grade for a written essay in a French class have decided to sue the Center de Services Scolaire des Premières-Seigneuries and a teacher for $40,000.
Posted at 2:38 p.m.
The Supreme Court will have to decide: did young Emma* deserve that disastrous grade for being involved in a plagiarism incident, or did the teacher and school wrongly punish an unblameable young girl?
Thus, the documents filed by the prosecutor’s office in the courthouse tell the story of the events. These allegations have not yet been proven in court.
This whole story is from last November. The 15-year-old attends the École des Sentiers in Quebec. She has to write a composition as a team in the French course at secondary level 4. With the help of a classmate, she wrote the controversial text.
A few days later, both girls received a grade of zero for plagiarism. Two boys in her class allegedly submitted a strangely similar text. According to the parents’ lawyer’s application, one of the boys was the “heart friend” of Emma’s partner for this work.
“Emma was absolutely devastated and dismayed” when she told her parents that night, according to the lawsuit, first reported by Radio-Canada. She “burst into tears.”
The parents will then take a number of actions to overturn the teacher’s decision. You first write him an email.
“There is no difference between students who copy work and those who pass it on: in both cases there is serious misconduct,” the teacher replied, according to an email submitted by prosecutors in evidence.
The parents then approached the Examination Board of the Center de Services Scolaire des Premières-Seigneuries and then the Pupils’ Ombudsman, without failing to send a formal notice to the teacher. The rating is retained.
According to the lawsuit, the likely scenario is that Emma’s partner showed the composition to her boyfriend without his knowledge. The boy would have followed suit. As a sanction, Emma received a grade of zero, which was “the equivalent of guilt by association”.
“This behavior constitutes treatment that demeans and degrades a person by attacking their intellectual honesty without evidence,” the parents wrote in their application.
The girl’s parents are therefore applying to the Supreme Court to condemn the school service center and the teacher for misconduct, violation of the right to dignity and damage to reputation so that “such injustice towards a minor will not happen again in the future.”
Specifically, they are seeking the annulment of the zero grade, removal of any mention of plagiarism in the young girl’s record, a letter of apology from the teacher and the Center de Services Scolaire, compensatory damages of $30,000 and punitive damages of $10,000 plus attorneys’ fees.
Emma and her parents “cried a lot and experienced a lot of stress, turmoil, inconvenience, fear, anxiety, helplessness, despair and loss of zest for life,” the lawsuit states.
The Premières-Seigneuries school service center had still not responded to La Presse at the time of writing.
*This is a fictitious first name because the girl is a minor.