Retired Ligonier Valley teacher calls for investigation into how incident with special needs student was handled

It’s been a year and a half since Linda O’Sullivan had a life-changing encounter with a special needs student while she was working as an art teacher at Ligonier Valley High School.

Now retired, the 60-year-old Ligonier Borough woman is still recovering from face, head and neck injuries resulting from what she says was an assault by the student but has been termed an accident by at least one school district administrator.

O’Sullivan said district administrators, not the special needs student, were at fault for not taking action to protect other students and staff from the boy’s violent behavior and not providing an appropriate level of care for him.

“This student had no malice toward me,” O’Sullivan said of the incident Feb. 7, 2023, when the student struck her in the face. “In many ways, he is a greater victim than me. His needs were not being met, and he was dangerous to not only himself, but to students and employees he had access to.

“He was just dumped into a life skills classroom with nonviolent students.”

At this month’s school board meeting and on social media, O’Sullivan called for an investigation of district Superintendent Tim Kantor, charging he failed to act on previous concerns reported in September 2022 about the student’s behavior. She also faulted Ed Moran, the district’s director of education and special education.

O’Sullivan additionally charged Kantor with omitting the Feb. 7 incident from Safe School reports on student incidents submitted by the district to state officials for the 2022-23 school year. She cited other inconsistencies in the reports.

She said she also learned the district didn’t preserve surveillance footage of her encounter with the student. O’Sullivan said she suffered a traumatic brain injury in the incident and doesn’t remember many details.

“This all took place in the high school auditorium lobby,” O’Sullivan said. “There are multiple cameras in that area.”

Kantor and Moran didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.

School board President Don Gilbert and recently appointed district solicitor Gary Matta said at the board meeting they would look into O’Sullivan’s charges.

“There was a previous solicitor that I’m sure looked into these issues, and the board at this point does not believe that there has been any wrongdoing whatsoever,” Matta said.

But the board directed Matta to review information related to O’Sullivan’s concerns.

“If needed, we’ll make some appropriate modification,” Matta said. “If not, we’ll move forward in the manner that we have.”

He added, “The safety of our students is the most important thing that we have concern over.”

Gilbert said he joined the school board close to the time of the Feb. 7, 2023, incident and had little information about it.

“I don’t want you to think that we are discrediting anything that has happened or any of these items of concern that you have,” he told O’Sullivan. “If something stands out in those reports that requires follow-up action, I will ask the board to follow that up with whatever means are necessary.

“If there is something that seems out of place, the appropriate authorities — whether that be the Department of Education, the district attorney, the local police, whoever — they will then be involved.”

‘My doctors were stunned’

On Feb. 7, 2023, the high school ceramics studio wasn’t deemed a safe environment for the special needs student, so O’Sullivan said she prepared a cart of materials for him to use under supervision by other staff in a nearby hallway.

When an aide said her help was needed in the hallway, O’Sullivan said she found another teacher restraining the student.

“He had thrown materials off the cart and onto the floor,” she said. “The student had bitten through his shirt and was self-harming.”

O’Sullivan can’t recall many other details of the incident.

“One teacher found that I was crying, and she had called for help,” she said. “I don’t remember any of that. My first memory is I was sitting in the ambulance and a man was saying they were going to call my husband.”

A report of district workers’ compensation claims for 2022-23 mentions the Feb. 7 incident. It notes a student struck O’Sullivan in the face, but it lists only a bruised, black left eye as a resulting injury.

It actually was the right side of her face that was bruised, O’Sullivan said, but she suffered much more severe injuries.

“My doctors were stunned by the level of my injuries,” she said. She believes her head may have hit into a wall after her face was struck.

She underwent surgery on her jaw and is facing additional procedures.

“They cut out a portion of my lower right jaw and put in a titanium artificial jaw joint,” she said. “I have chronic jaw pain and I have to be careful what I eat, chewing-wise.

”I have partial hearing loss in my right ear and some torn ligaments in my neck that are getting better slowly with therapy. I have balance issues and some learning disability and mental fatigue. I’m hoping it’s going to slowly improve.”

O’Sullivan contends the incident wasn’t properly reported to or investigated by local police.

Ligonier Valley police Chief Michael Matrunics said one of his department’s officers, who serves as a school resource officer at the district, was on the high school campus at the time and responded to assist while an emergency medical crew was tending to O’Sullivan.

He said the incident was turned over to the Westmoreland County District Attorney’s Office for investigation. O’Sullivan said she was interviewed by a county detective but was upset to learn about the lack of surveillance footage.

Spokesperson Melanie Jones confirmed the District Attorney’s Office investigated and no charges resulted.

‘A complete failure’

O’Sullivan said the student returned to the high school the day after she was injured, and she learned he eventually was placed in a private school the following August.

“The very next day, with no changes in policy or protocol, that student had free access to every student and every employee in the high school,” she said. “The student cannot in any way be held accountable. The big issue is a complete failure by the school district administration.”

Sheila Lundquist of Ligonier confirmed that she alerted administrators to her concerns about the same special needs student after serving as a substitute teacher in his life skills classroom for several days in September 2022. A copy of her email exchange with school administrators was provided to TribLive.

“It was just not an appropriate placement and it wasn’t a safe placement,” Lundquist said regarding the student. “I could see it in the first few hours working with him.”

Lundquist said the student slapped her several times across the chest and once across the face.

“He slapped me across my upper cheekbone, eye and side of my head with one slap,” she said in her email to administrators.

On one occasion, she said, the student hit a classmate on the back of the head. Another time, she said, he threw multiple books, one of which struck another student in the back of the head.

An emailed response from Kantor to Lundquist indicated the school administration was aware of the situation in the classroom.

“I wasn’t going into the life skills classroom again because it just wasn’t safe,” Lundquist said.

O’Sullivan provided a copy of her own email conversation with district administrators, stemming from the Feb. 7, 2023, incident, in which she criticized Kantor and Moran and called for change in handling of special needs students.

In an emailed reply to O’Sullivan, Moran wrote that he was “sorry that the accident with the student happened” while denying that the student’s needs had not been met. He said “accommodations, trainings and consultations” had occurred.

O’Sullivan said she had never been trained to handle a violent student.

“People tend to think that there are these magical placement options for children with profound need,” Moran wrote. “Unfortunately, this just isn’t true.”

He added, “I think it is important to remember that this accident had no malice to it. There was no pre-thought or calculation to it. It was truly a manifestation of a disability.

“The student in question is a child. The best place to educate a child is with his peers and with people who care about him and know him.”

No incentive to change

While her workers’ compensation case remains open, O’Sullivan said the recovery from her 2023 injuries has interfered with her plans for post-retirement work — including interests in teaching at the college level, working with at-risk youth through a local nonprofit and restoring and flipping homes.

Attorney Adam Quatrini, who is representing O’Sullivan in her workers’ compensation case, said there is no legal route for her to take civil action against the district.

“That is one of the pitfalls of the Workers’ Compensation Act,” Quatrini said. With the inability to seek compensation from an employer for pain and suffering, he said, “There’s not an incentive to change.

“Linda’s biggest concern is that these (special needs) students are not getting the proper placement that they need, subjecting other students and teachers to assaults that obviously are something that can’t be tolerated.”

O’Sullivan said she decided to go public with her concerns about Ligonier Valley because “I felt I was getting nowhere. There were no changes being made.

”I don’t want something worse to happen to another employee and certainly not to a student.”