Lawsuit filed against Tulsa Public Schools after student assaulted on campus

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Tulsa County District Court by Mica Montgomery against Tulsa Public Schools, seeks an unspecified amount of compensatory damages in excess of $75,000.

The lawsuit alleges that a seventh-grader at the middle school, whose parent is Montgomery, was attacked at school by other students in October 2022 after a school official asked her who had damaged another student’s property while in class.

Montgomery put the girl in online classes soon after, according to the lawsuit.

“She just didn’t feel like they were doing enough to keep her safe,” said Tod Mercer, an attorney who filed the lawsuit on Montgomery’s behalf.

The ordeal began Oct. 20, 2022, when during a class at the middle school a female student removed a video controller from another student’s backpack and broke it, according to the petition.

After the teacher was unable to figure out who broke the device, the assistant principal was contacted to help, according to the petition.

The assistant principal came to the class and asked Montgomery’s child to step outside in the hallway, where she was asked about the incident, according to the petition.

The girl “was afraid not to tell the assistant principal the truth, so she told the vice-principal who took it out of the backpack and broke it,” according to the petition.

Mercer said his client’s child was the only student questioned and is “one of the good students” who makes “straight-A’s.”

The assistant principal then immediately returned to the classroom and removed the student who had damaged the other student’s property and placed that student in detention, according to the petition.

“It’s just the simple fact that she basically outed her in public and started this whole process,” Mercer said of the school official.

The petition alleges that after emerging from detention later that day, the student and her friends attacked Montgomery’s child in a school hallway, knocking her to the floor while punching and kicking her in the face, head and body.

A one-minute video provided by Mercer to the Tulsa World depicts a school hallway crowded with students prior to two girls knocking another girl to the ground and then punching and kicking her and dragging her by her hair while other students looked on and cheered.

After being called to the school by officials, Montgomery took her daughter to a hospital emergency room after she complained of a headache and pain in her face and jaw, according to the petition.

“As a result of the attack, (the girl) suffered severe injuries, both physically and emotionally, and she will continue to suffer from those injuries in the future,” according to the petition.

The lawsuit claims that Montgomery was told that the students responsible for the assault had been permitted to return to school and that other students had warned the girl not to come back with them there.

Mercer said school officials’ actions resulted in the assault.

“If you are going to do that, you have to do it in such a way that all of it is done in private,” Mercer said, referring to the questioning of students.

Mercer said the child has been doing well in her online classes.

“We’ve got to do something about bullying in our schools,” Mercer said. “What we are doing is not enough. It is happening every day.”

The lawsuit’s filing follows the Feb. 8 death of 16-year-old Nex Benedict, an Owasso Public Schools student who identified as nonbinary and used gender-neutral pronouns.

Benedict died one day after being assaulted in a school restroom.

Owasso police said Wednesday that autopsy results indicate that Benedict did not die from physical trauma.

Officials are hoping the results of toxicology tests will point to a cause of death.

Tulsa Public Schools did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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