Protecting the school’s budget is the key goal of the Student Accident Program.
You hope you never have an accident but having a plan in place is the best way to protect the school from unexpected injuries. Let’s look at an example from one of our schools:
A Christian School in the Midwest participates in different sporting activities including football and cheerleading. During a regular cheerleading practice, a young student fell after being tossed in the air, resulting in a broken bone and slight concussion. This was simply an accident and was an event supervised by the cheer staff.
The school felt their waiver forms signed at the beginning of the year were sufficient protection, and did not have any Student Accident protection at the time, assuming the parent’s coverage would suffice. It had worked in the past for the school. However, the family had lost coverage after the start of the school year.
Medical bills began to accumulate and bills were eventually turned into collection facilities for lack of payment. Legal action was taken and the school was eventually required to pay. This was not out of malice but instead because of hospitals, doctors, and collectors that were demanding money for bills the parents couldn’t possibly cover out of pocket.
The school paid out of their budget for the medical bills; which impacted their financial growth for that year and impacted some building projects they had planned for the upcoming school year.
The two most important lessons from this experience are:
- You cannot waive negligence. Attorneys will always focus on negligence in a liability claim.
- You can never be sure who is or isn’t covered on their own. Even asking at the beginning of the season is no guarantee a family will have coverage the next day.
We installed The Student Accident Program for them for the remainder of the school year and have protected them ever since.
Your budget is vital to the performance and mission of your school. Student Accident is the key to unlocking insurance funds to pay for accidents.
