The lawsuit names St-Lazare art teacher Mario Perron and the Lester B. Pearson School Board.
Published Mar 25, 2024 • Last updated 10 minutes ago • 3 minute read
Joel DeBellefeuille says his 13-year-old son told him he found a portrait that a fellow student had painted of him had been posted for sale online.Image courtesy of Joel DeBellefeuille
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The parents of 10 students at a Montreal-area junior high school have launched a $1.575-million lawsuit against their school’s art teacher alleging he tried to sell the students’ artwork and merchandise emblazoned with their drawings online without their knowledge.
The lawsuit also names the Lester B. Pearson School Board, arguing that as the teacher’s employer it had a responsibility to check his social media profiles and other professional activities before hiring him and is responsible for wrongful acts carried out while under its employ.
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The students in Grades 7 and 8 at Westwood Junior High School in St-Lazare discovered in early February that their art teacher, Mario Perron, was listing for sale thousands of copies of items, including mugs, tote bags, iPhone cases, T-shirts and towels, featuring their artwork, the lawsuit states. The students said they were doing an internet search to look up their teacher’s art and found their own work listed under his profile on websites selling artwork.
The prices of the 2,976 listed items ranged from US$9.50 to US$113, the lawsuit says.
“Perron used the work of 96 of his students and reproduced them on 31 different items to put them on sale and make a personal profit,” the lawsuit reads. “To cap it off, the accused Perron, for commercial purposes, specified the name of the child as the artist, which would easily allow them to be identified on public platforms, especially since the artworks in question are portraits.”
The 10 parents are claiming $5,000 for each of the 31 items they say were put on sale with their children’s drawings, for a total of $155,000 each. They are also asking for $10,000 each in punitive damages on the basis that Perron “clearly planned out his actions and was in a position of authority over minors.”
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Under the Canadian Copyright Act, damages of between $500 and $20,000 can be sought if the infringements are for commercial purposes.
The parents are also requesting their children’s artworks be taken down from any websites and that a report of any sales be transmitted, and are asking for a written letter of apology.
“Mr. Perron did not take into consideration the children’s confidentiality when he posted and then attempted to sell their drawings online without the consent of the children, the parents or the school board,” said Joel DeBellefeuille, one of the parents filing the lawsuit. “This is extremely troubling and very concerning.
“Here we are in a digital age, where families and parents are there to scrutinize everything that our children are looking at, but who would have thought that it should have been the parents scrutinizing the teacher?”
Legal letters were sent to Perron and the school board in February and March, requesting $1.75 million in payments. When those went unanswered, parents filed the lawsuit Friday in Quebec Superior Court. The teacher and school board have 15 days to respond to the lawsuit.
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The parents’ allegations have not been tested in court.
Edith Liard, who is also among those filing the lawsuit, said the school and its teacher broke their trust.
“My daughter loves art, always has been into art, and this year after everything that happened, she said to me, ‘I don’t think I’ll do art next year,’” she said.
An administrator at Westwood Junior High School said Monday that Perron was not presently at the school. She could not say if he had been let go, referring all questions to the school board. His name has been removed from the school’s staff list online.
Perron did not respond to previous messages seeking comment.
The Lester B. Pearson School Board said Monday it does not comment on internal investigations or human resources issues. In February, it issued a statement saying the board was taking the allegations very seriously and an investigation was underway.
The artworks in question were created by 96 students for their art class with Perron. The works include portraits the students made of themselves in the style of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat for a class project assigned by Perron called Creepy Portrait.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
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