Wilmington parents suing, claim daughter forced to urinate on bus
Sun-Times Media January 8, 2013 8:06PM
Updated: February 10, 2013 6:16PM
A Wilmington couple is suing Wilmington School District 209U, Superintendent Jay Plese and Wilmington Middle School, among others, claiming their middle-school aged daughter was humiliated on a field trip when teachers forced her to urinate in a cup on a school bus.
In the lawsuit filed Tuesday, Todd and Lisa Holmes said their daughter was among a group of students returning from a Jan. 10, 2012, field trip to a Chicago Wolves hockey game when she asked the adults on board to stop the bus so she could use the restroom.
Adults on the bus refused to find a restroom and made the girl urinate into a cup while standing on the front stairs of the still-moving school bus, the lawsuit claims. They pulled over so she could throw the cup out, then kept going, the parents claim.
The parents claim their daughter — who is named only as Jane Doe in the lawsuit — was left humiliated and suffered extreme emotional distress from the incident.
The Southern Will County Cooperative for Special Education, which chaperoned the trip, also is named as a defendant, as is one of its employees. Two Wilmington Middle School employees also are being sued, as is Illinois Central School Bus, its bus driver and its radio bus dispatcher.
None of the defendants could be reached for comment Tuesday night.
The lawsuit, filed in Cook County Circuit Court, claims three counts of emotional distress and seeks more than $150,000 in damages.
