Simon Mangiurea isn’t an unemployable loser in real life, but he played one on Thursday. Mangiurea, a senior at Mundelein High School, portrayed the semi-literate plaintiff in a mock trial held before his business law class.
To add a touch of realism, Ray McKoski, chief judge of the 19th Judicial Circuit, visited the classroom in his black robe to preside over the case.
Mangiurea played the role of a recent grad who is too dumb to dig ditches and decided to sue his alma mater for educational malpractice.
“I keep applying for jobs, but they keep rejecting me, saying I lack the basic skills,” Mangiurea testified. But under hectoring from the school district’s attorney, played by Tom Hauk, Mangiurea admitted that truancy and laziness might have been responsible for his lame life skills.
“The school had reading classes,” Hauk noted. “Why didn’t you attend those?”
“They were too early in the morning, and it was inconvenient to get up that early,” Mangiurea responded.
Mangiurea’s attorney blamed the high school for letting him slide by without learning to read or do math.
The school district “has nowhere to point fingers except the teachers and educators in its own schools,” argued Courtney Bosco. “It is quite obvious that [the defendant] is not proficient in reading and math skills.”
In the end, McKoski ruled in favor of the district. Most states don’t allow educational malpractice cases, because “the courts say there is an inherent uncertainty in deciding whose fault a lack of education is.”
This was the second mock case this fall in teacher Judy Juske’s business law class, but the first argued in front of a real judge.
Both attorneys said they were nervous about the presence of a black robe, but McKoski praised them for their preparation. Hauk and Bosco studied similar cases, and even the witnesses researched their roles. One student who played a school administrator sat down and talked with an official at Mundelein.
“You people did an excellent job on this,” McKoski said. “It was a difficult issue. You were very well prepared, and as a judge I’m expert at spotting witnesses and lawyers who aren’t prepared.”
