Franklin V Gwinnett
On December 11th, 1990, Christine Franklin filed a lawsuit against the Gwinnett County Public School system. During her sophomore year in high school at Gwinnett High School, she was continually harassed sexually by her economics teacher Andrew Hill. Mr. Hill would kiss her, feel on her, and constantly try to engage in inappropriate sexual conversations with Franklin. Franklin first went to staff at the school. Nothing was done. Franklin told the administration on the Board of Education and they begged for no charges to be pressed on the school because they didn’t want a bad reputation or for the incident to publicize. Instead, Mr. Hill offered to resign from teaching if no charges were pressed, so the school looked past the whole thing. On February 26th,1992, Franklin took the problem to the Federal District Court under the Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Title IX gives students protection against having natural rights violated while in school. Because of that, Franklin requested that monetary restitution be paid for the abuse and harassment during school. The district court decided to drop the case, because Title IX does not authorize a “monetary” reward for damages. Franklin didn’t stop there. She took her case to the United States Supreme Court, and asked for an appeal, saying that she was in fact, entitled to monetary restitution from the school district. The U.S Supreme Court ruled, that Franklin was right. They also referenced similar cases like “Cannon V. University of Chicago” and “Marbury V. Madison”. In both cases, Title IX was enforceable, and further used to expand the limitations and boundaries on what all your entitled to under Title IX. But this case also raised another question. Why did the school board not take immediate actions to help Franklin? They did no investigations when it was first alleged that Hill was sexually harassing Franklin, and then ended up taking Hill up on his offer to resign and not press