When bullied students end their lives, parents are suing. And schools are paying.

Gabriel Taye was a slight boy who wore button-down shirts and neckties to his Cincinnati elementary school. Just 8 years old, he loved learning and made the honor roll. But other students often bullied him — punching, shoving and kicking him during incidents that dated back to first grade, according to court documents.

Third grade was the worst. One afternoon, a student knocked Gabriel to the floor in a school restroom, where he lay unconscious for seven minutes, according to a lawsuit the family filed. Others stepped over his body, some kicking him as they passed, a video recording shows. The school told his mother he had fainted, the lawsuit said, and she kept him home for a day. When he returned, a classmate tried to flush Gabriel’s beloved Batman water bottle down a toilet.

Hours later, the child took his life.

When his parents finally grasped the cruelties Gabriel had endured, they sued Cincinnati Public Schools, becoming part of a steadily growing trend: Parents whose bullied children end their lives are seeking to hold schools accountable. More and more are filing suit, according to attorneys and others involved. And some are pressing schools to memorialize their children or tighten their practices, so other children are not similarly harmed.

The Taye family reached a $3 million settlement with Cincinnati Public Schools, which committed in 2021 to reform anti-bullying protocols. Other high-profile cases followed in 2023: A school system in Utah settled a claim for $2 million, one in Connecticut settled for $5 million, and another in New Jersey agreed to $9.1 million.

“It’s a wake-up call to schools around the country that unless you protect our children, you will be in the same position: You will be sued, and you will have to pay substantial amounts of money to settle those cases,” said Bruce Nagel, an attorney for the family in the New Jersey lawsuit.

Bullying is widespread in the nation’s schools, and cases associated with suicide are few by comparison. Even so, The Washington Post identified nearly 200 student suicides since 2016 that were linked to school bullying in news accounts or court records. There are likely many more.

Nearly 10 percent were children ages 7 to 10.

The greatest share of students who took their lives were aged 11 to 14. A 13-year-old California girl who wanted to be a lawyer was called ugly and taunted as a loser. A 12-year old Indiana boy excelled at baseball but was abused so relentlessly he hated his life. An introverted 13-year-old girl in Louisiana who craved friendship was targeted for nearly everything: her glasses, braces, clothes, shoes, body shape.

Some students left notes that revealed the devastating power of a classmate’s words. Others wrote in journals. Parents sometimes knew their children were hurting, but not how much. Others had little idea about the bullying. They discovered a trail of insults and misery on social media accounts only after their children were dead.

A few tormentors did not stop when a student died. In Pennsylvania, someone noted the first anniversary of a 15-year-old’s death by posting on social media a photo of him with a noose around his neck. In New Jersey, a juvenile was charged with Zoom-bombing a 17-year-old’s virtual funeral with threats to blow up the funeral home and turn the casket to ashes.

Families argue that schools have a legal obligation to keep children safe, and many political leaders agree: Fifty states have enacted laws to combat school bullying. But in day-to-day school life, some policies are not robust, and others are not enforced. And advocates say that a belief persists in some communities that bullying is part of childhood and that “kids will be kids.”

Efforts to curtail bullying are not a priority for many schools across the nation, especially after the pandemic left schools with even greater needs than before, said Dorothy Espelage, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has studied the issue for three decades. “It’s not just North Carolina,” she said. “It’s all over this country.”

The National School Boards Association declined an interview for this story. Several school systems with recent cases have defended their actions, saying they handle bullying properly, and many say they are committed to safe schools. Some districts did not respond to inquiries from The Post.

Experts point out that bullying does not “cause” suicide, which typically happens for a complex set of reasons. A student who is being bullied may also struggle with mental illness, early childhood trauma, family conflict, sexual or gender identity issues, or many other challenges.

Still, there is no question that bullying causes harm. Research shows students who are bullied are more likely to be depressed and anxious and to feel increased sadness and loneliness. Their grades at school often drop. Their absences rise. Sleep and eating habits can deteriorate. They face an increased risk for suicide-related behavior, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Schools know that if they do not address harassment and bullying that there is a foreseeable risk that suicide could result,” said Adele Kimmel, senior attorney and director of the Students’ Civil Rights Project at the nonprofit legal advocacy organization Public Justice.

One of her clients was the family of Nigel Shelby, an openly gay 9th grader in Alabama’s Huntsville City Schools who was repeatedly targeted with slurs about his sexual orientation and, according to court documents, told by classmates that he did not deserve to live. Sometimes, school officials were present, and once, he was physically battered, according to the suit.

The teenager, who had a history of depression, reported the bullying to an administrator, but she allegedly said that being gay was a choice and that he would have to accept the consequences, according to the complaint. It said that, when he later told the same administrator of his suicidal thoughts, she suggested that Nigel, who was Black, and a classmate who was concerned about him get up and dance to some “black people music” to help Nigel feel better.

The administrator did not offer counseling or emergency mental health care, according to the complaint, and she did not investigate the harassment allegations. Nor did she tell Nigel’s parents what he had told her, the complaint alleged. LGBTQ+ students are at much greater risk of bullying and suicide attempts than their peers, research shows.

Nigel, his mother’s only child, was 15 when he killed himself in 2019.

The Shelby family filed suit in 2021, and in court filings, the school system denied its allegations about bullying and the administrator’s actions. Just this year, the school district settled for $840,000 and agreed to adopt policy and training changes to better protect LGBTQ+ students from harassment, which Nigel’s mother, Camika Shelby, hopes will spare other families from tragedy.

“Even now, it’s been four years and I have days where I wake up and immediately feel like all of this just happened,” Camika Shelby said, wishing that policies had been improved before Nigel’s death.

Craig Williams, a spokesman for Huntsville City Schools, said the district is committed to a positive school culture, without bullying. He noted that the settlement includes provisions to update district policies, expand climate surveys and strengthen its tracking of bullying allegations. “Our hearts and thoughts remain with the Shelby family,” he said.

As with many other school districts, Huntsville did not accept blame or liability in its settlement.

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Bullying is not always apparent to families, and many incidents go unrecorded by schools. Students don’t always discuss what’s happening. Some kids think it’s not solvable. Others don’t want to worry parents, or they believe that if a bully gets in trouble, it will only provoke more abuse.

Twelve-year-old Drayke Hardman, who attended a charter school in Utah, had talked with his family about a bully for months, then stopped, said his mother, Samie Hardman. Shortly before his suicide, they had a long talk, and she pressed him about the situation again, she said. But Drayke did not open up, instead telling her: “Snitches get stitches.”

Asked what he meant, Hardman recalls her son saying: “Every time you tell the school and he gets in trouble, it’s worse.”

The family did not take legal action against the school after Drayke died, Hardman said, but she said she has found meaning in helping to raise awareness about bullying and to teach empathy. Contacted by The Post more than a year after Drayke’s death, the executive committee of the Utah State Charter School Board said it was “devastated by this loss” and would stand in solidarity with those affected.

“This tragedy reminds us both of the urgent need to address bullying in all schools, and the lasting impact it can have on young lives,” the board said.

What do schools owe?

The internet and smartphones have given rise to types of bullying that many earlier generations never knew. Now cruelty flows easily from social media to school classrooms and back again, especially in schools that allow cellphone use during the day.

Mallory Grossman had a tough time escaping it. She was a petite school cheerleader and gymnast in New Jersey who loved to spend time outdoors. But sixth grade at Copeland Middle School in Rockaway Township became unbearable.

Four girls harassed Mallory — so much that a school official advised her to eat lunch in a counseling office rather than in the cafeteria, according to the family’s lawsuit. The complaint alleges that bullying took place at school, while other taunts were made via social media or text messages. The girls told her that she was ugly, fat, jiggly and had frizzy hair. “U have no friends,” one girl wrote in a Snapchat with a photo of Mallory alone.

In front of other students at school, a classmate asked when Mallory planned to kill herself, according to the complaint.

Mallory’s parents sought help at the school — from administrators, a counselor, and a bullying and harassment coordinator — but little was done, court documents asserted. Once, the school forced Mallory and her tormentors to hug each other. In June 2017, at a three-hour meeting that included Mallory’s parents, there was no plan to punish the offenders, according to the lawsuit. The principal admitted that Mallory was not safe at school and should not remain there that day, according to her mother, Dianne Grossman, and the family’s lawsuit.

Hours later, Mallory took her life.

“You cannot put it into words,” Grossman said of seeing her child in a casket.

In 2017, the district had said it was “categorically false” that it ignored the family and failed to address bullying. Her parents argued in their lawsuit that Mallory was subjected to “ongoing and systemic bullying,” without interventions that were needed. Six years later, the case settled for $9.1 million, believed to be one of the nation’s largest of its kind.

The Rockaway Township school district said at the time that an insurance carrier would cover the payment and that academic funding would not be affected. It said the agreement was initiated by the legal team for its insurer. In an email, Superintendent Richard Corbett declined further comment.

Like many grieving parents, Dianne Grossman turned her energy toward helping other children. She founded a nonprofit called “Mallory’s Army,” gives talks to schools and pushes for anti-bullying legislation. In New Jersey, “Mallory’s Law,” named for her daughter, was adopted in 2022.

“They don’t talk like ‘Leave it to Beaver’ anymore,” Grossman said. “Now it’s, ‘Go kill yourself.’ And when a victim hears over and over again that they are not worthy of living … it’s dangerous territory.”

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More than 1 in 5 students ages 12 to 18 report being bullied at school, according to federal data from 2019. Girls were more often excluded, insulted and the target of rumors, while boys were more frequently tripped, shoved or spit on. Nearly half of teens have experienced cyberbullying, according to a 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center.

Anti-bullying efforts

There is no national data, but attorneys and experts say lawsuits on this issue are on the rise.

“We’ve seen an uptick definitely in the last 10 to 15 years, and even more in the last five to eight years, in the number of parents calling to talk about various incarnations of school harassment and bullying,” said Kevin Costello, an attorney in New Jersey who has worked on about 250 bullying and harassment cases.

Bullying lawsuits can be hard to litigate because laws vary widely from state to state. Cases are also filed under federal law, often through Title IX or under constitutional due-process protections.

“Most parents, especially when a child has died, are seeking a full reckoning of all the facts that related to their loved one’s death, because they just can’t fathom how it came to this,” said Al Gerhardstein, co-counsel in Gabriel Taye’s case. “The lawsuit serves as the way to get that rigorous review of everything that led to the tragedy.”

Families seek compensation, Gerhardstein said, but “even more than that, they typically really want to be a voice for not having this happen again.”

School district efforts to tamp down on bullying are “very ad hoc,” said Sameer Hinduja, a professor of criminology at Florida Atlantic University. Funding may be an issue, he said, but “the big picture is that schools have a responsibility to anticipate foreseeable dangers that children might face.”

“Schools can’t prevent every incident,” he added, “but they can at least convey and demonstrate that they’ve really, really tried in practical, measurable ways.”

Anti-bullying efforts go back many years. Programs that show “at least some success” with traditional bullying — Olweus, KiVa, Positive Action, PBIS — should be combined with resources about cyberbullying, according to Hinduja, who teamed up with criminologist Justin Patchin on the book “Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard.” Both are directors of the Cyberbullying Research Center.

Suicide prevention efforts are critical, too — especially as students increasingly report suicidal thoughts and plans, said Ron Avi Astor, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, who studies bullying and school violence. “Schools need to know that’s a separate and really important thing to do,” he said.

Legal cases against schools sometimes end with more than a monetary settlement.

A district in Utah agreed in August to pay $2 million to the family of 10-year-old Isabella “Izzy” Tichenor, saying it would place a statue of Izzy in her elementary school and deliver a short presentation about her during its annual employee training on harassment and discrimination. Izzy was allegedly bullied by classmates and a teacher who said she smelled bad. Once, the fifth grader brought air freshener to school to spray on herself, said her mother, Brittany Tichenor.

Tichenor said Izzy also was subjected to racial slurs and taunting related to her autism. Her mostly White school system had recently been investigated by the Justice Department, which found “serious and widespread racial harassment” of Black and Asian American students and a persistent failure by schools to respond. The district agreed to steps to improve staff training and handling of discrimination complaints.

“No mother should have to be at a 10-year-old’s funeral because they committed suicide because they couldn’t take what the school was doing,” Brittany Tichenor said.

The Davis School District described its agreement with the Tichenor family as a “mutual resolution” and said reports of bullying would be thoroughly documented, addressed promptly and punished appropriately. The girl’s death in 2021 “will always impact our community and school,” officials said in an August statement. A spokesman said the district had no further comment.

A massive settlement

Bart Palosz’s parents immigrated from Poland when he was small. Trying to do the best by their children, they soon moved into the high-performing Greenwich school system. His sister did well, but Bart was a target from almost the beginning — taller than the other boys, with a foreign accent and an awkward manner.

His harassers were 25 to 40 other students, said the family’s attorney, Jennifer Goldstein. Bart was hit with a locker door, kicked in the genitals, punched in the face and pushed on stairways, according to court documents. His cellphone was smashed. He was bullied, Goldstein said, “over and over, year after year, in middle school and high school.”

Bart, his mother and sister, as well as teachers, a friend and a social worker, reported a total of roughly 25 incidents. After years of being bullied, Bart attended the first day of 10th grade at Greenwich High School in 2013. Then he rode the bus home and took his life before dinner.

The $5 million settlement of the family’s lawsuit, announced in February, is believed to be the largest municipal settlement of school bullying claims in Connecticut. “We think that the size of the settlement reflects the magnitude of the Greenwich Public School system’s failure and, even though they don’t acknowledge it, their recognition of that failure,” Goldstein said.

A Greenwich school district spokesman referred the issue to a city attorney, who did not respond to emails and calls.

The teenager’s sister, who considered Bart her best friend, said the lengthy legal quest was a mission of accountability. “The whole time, we really wanted the school system to take responsibility for failing to do what it was supposed to do,” said Beata Kirschbaum. Her hope, she said, is that the lawsuit keeps it from happening again.

A school memorial

In New Jersey, the Lawrenceville School, an elite boarding school, took a highly unusual approach: It accepted responsibility for failing to protect Jack Reid, a student who killed himself in 2022.

“The School acknowledges that bullying and unkind behavior, and actions taken or not taken by the School, likely contributed to Jack’s death,” the school said, following an investigation of what went wrong.

Reid, a well-liked 11th-grader, had been the subject of a rumor falsely accusing him of sexual assault. The allegation was spread in spring 2021, then seemed to die out. But it eventually resurfaced, with Jack described as a rapist on an app used by boarding school students.

By spring 2022, as the issue grew more tangled, some students mistakenly blamed Jack for the expulsion of a student involved in bullying Jack, according to the school’s public statement. The night the expelled student was leaving, some talked harshly about Jack.

The 17-year-old died by suicide in his dorm room.

In December the school sent a lengthy letter to its community with findings from more than 1,000 hours of investigation, acknowledging that it had fallen “tragically short.” On the first anniversary of Jack’s death in April 2023, it posted a letter on its website, saying it had reached an agreement with Jack’s parents. The letter also laid out what happened.

The school said Jack was a victim of bullying; it had looked into the rumor before Jack died, finding it to be false but not publicizing that discovery. “There were steps that the School should in hindsight have taken but did not,” the statement said.

Since then, the school has hired a dean of campus well-being; contracted with a bullying specialist to help revise policies and training; and contributed to a foundation created in Jack’s name, officials said.

“We never imagined that our happy child could be driven to take his own life,” his parents wrote on the foundation’s website. “And we believe that if this could happen to our son, it could happen to anyone’s.”

In Cincinnati, it is now easier to report bullying — by clicking a “bully button” on each school’s website — and it’s no longer regarded as “horseplay,” said Michele Young, co-counsel in the Taye case. During a two-year effort overseen by the court, the school district remade its anti-bullying efforts: training staff, educating students, and establishing protocols for investigating and responding to incidents, she said.

Incidents are logged into a database, parents are notified, and patterns are tracked — bullying hot spots, for example, or repeat targets. Restorative practices are used to help students accept responsibility and learn from what happened.

“I felt that within two years, you saw a transformation of the way bullying was dealt with in the entire city,” Young said.

Cincinnati schools officials outlined many of the same changes that family lawyers identified, saying the issue is a priority and pointing out that the district employs a social worker focused solely on bullying. “The District deeply mourns the tragic loss of any student, and appreciates the collaborative work with Gabriel Taye’s family to create positive improvements to anti-bullying efforts,” they said.

Benyam Taye, the father of the third-grader, remembers Gabriel as energetic, loving, playful and full of laughter — a boy with dreams of joining the military. Suicide was not on the family’s radar. “At 8, you wouldn’t imagine that,” said Taye, who keeps a photo of Gabriel in the cab of the 18-wheeler he drives for work.

At the school Gabriel attended, Carson Elementary, he is not forgotten. A polished granite bench near the entrance memorializes the boy. This, too, was part of the joint agreement. Gabriel’s photo is prominently set into the stone — his bright eyes and big grin, with his signature shirt and tie.

If you or someone you know needs help, visit 988lifeline.org, or call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.