As a dance instructor, you’re awesome at inspiring your class to move with the right steps and take pride in developing your students. But what happens when things don’t go according to plan? Are you covered for an accident?
Today’s deep dive is focused on everything dance instructors need to look for in a comprehensive liability insurance policy for dance teachers. We’ll explore what coverage types matter most and where to find the best value in dance insurance for your situation.
Why Do Dance Instructors Need Insurance in the First Place?
Being a dance instructor means you’re leading a group of students through all kinds of different styles of dance. Whether that’s a ballet class, merengue, or line dancing, your students are looking to you both for quality instruction and also to keep them safe during their session.
Accidents happen in all kinds of different ways. Pretending like an accident will never happen to you as a dance instructor is basically like driving blindfolded and hoping for the best. The point is, even for experienced dance instructors with years of experience and many successful classes under their belts, all it takes is one, single misstep to suddenly find yourself facing a liability claim.
Liability is a legal term that means you’re responsible for paying for someone else’s injuries or damages to their property when an accident occurs that you bear some responsibility for. In this day and age, frivolous lawsuits are unfortunately common. A claim against you can even be entirely baseless but you’ll still need to pay for legal defense fees. Instances like these are where insurance saves the day. But, you need to make sure your dance insurance is broad enough to cover the real types of risks facing dance professionals today.
A Closer Look at What Dance Insurance Covers
Think of dance instructor liability insurance as your career’s safety net. You can have all the experience in the world and provide the safest classes possible and still a simple slip and fall can bring incredible hardship in an instant for the professional practicing without insurance.
A dance instructor plan that provides proper coverage is one which has stout limits within three major types of liability facing dance teachers - general liability, professional liability, and product liability. We’ll explore each in a little more detail next.
- General liability: this is liability for injuries or damages to another person’s property as a result of an incident that occurs in, or around, your place of business. General liability is so-named because it covers many different scenarios for professionals. Often, this type of liability insurance is referred to as “slip and fall insurance” since this is a type of accident that’s all-too-common. An example could be a student tripping over the mats in your dance studio and injuring themselves in the fall. Slip and falls may seem relatively minor but there are thousands of examples where general liability lawsuits against businesses ran into the millions of dollars.
- Professional liability - this portion of dance instructor liability coverage pertains to the actual dance instruction you provide. When leading students, every teacher is doing their best to have a safe, yet effective dance lesson where students are progressing through their routines. A student that’s injured while taking a dance class may claim that your instruction was inadequate to prevent their injury.
Professional liability is also called malpractice, a term often used in the medical field. Thinking along those lines, professional liability coverage helps protect dance instructors from claims related to their professional advice i.e. dance instruction. An example could be as simple as a student pushing themselves too hard or otherwise injuring themselves during a dance class and holding their teacher responsible.
- Product liability - the third major type of liability that dance instructors face is for all of the different products that get used to provide a quality dance lesson for students. Malfunctioning equipment can result in severe injuries, to which a student may hold you responsible since you were the one to supply the equipment for their use. This could even pertain to the kinds of cleaners you use to keep your dance studio clean between classes. An adverse reaction is all it can take to suddenly face a product liability-related claim.
Of course, any dance instructor insurance program that provides useful coverage shouldn’t stop at the bare minimum. True, the three main types of liability above constitute the bulk of the risks facing professionals today; however, there are additional protections that should be in place to create a wall of protection around any dance instructor wanting to create a lasting career in dance.
Additional Protections Dance Teachers Need to Practice with Confidence
In order to provide really great dance instruction, you need a couple of things. One, is a space to provide the service, two is a variety of tools and equipment, and three is utilizing online services to conduct various parts of your business. With a comprehensive dance instructor insurance plan, provisions are made within each of these categories in order to provide the best level of protection possible for today’s dance professionals.
Additional protections you should look for in a high-quality dance insurance plan include:
- Rental damage coverage - most every dance teacher rents space in a studio in order to provide services. Your lease agreement with the studio almost always has a paragraph or two about what happens when damages occur, usually spelling out your responsibility to cover the costs of repairs. All it can take is a student having a slight misstep and damaging the space you’re occupying to suddenly be faced with a repair requiring thousands of dollars to fix. This everyday example is why rental damage coverage is so crucial in a policy that’s built for the real world dance teachers work in.
- Stolen/Damaged Equipment Protection - training ladders for oversplits, portable mirrors, dance floors and more are all part of the equipment you use everyday in order to provide a really great class for your students. These materials are tools of the trade so to speak and can be quite an investment but contribute to your overall success as a dance instructor. So when these tools go missing or are damaged during a session, having to foot the bill for a replacement can be a real financial burden. That’s why you need to see stolen/damaged equipment protection in a quality dance insurance policy. Coverage for the real types of risks facing dance instructors like these is what sets apart a mediocre policy from an all-inclusive one.
- Identity theft protection - today, dance teachers the world over have to rely on all kinds of technology in order to provide classes. You may accept electronic payments, use online bookkeeping, maintain a website, or use any number of different online tools to provide services. Unfortunately, a greater reliance on web tools means a greater likelihood of a cyber incident jeopardizing your personal information. When your personal data has been compromised, identity restoration can be both time-consuming and quite costly. That’s why you should always find an identity protection plan included with today’s top dance instructor insurance plans.
Having the added protection of these three categories means having a safety net that truly affords a professional the level of protection needed for long-term success as a dance instructor. These coverages are created to provide the most appropriate defenses against having to pay out-of-pocket for the real types of risk facing professionals teaching dance today.
How Much Insurance Does a Dance Instructor Need?
Just having great coverage types doesn’t get you very far if you don’t have enough protection to provide any real benefit. But plan limits can be somewhat tricky. Too little and you don’t have enough coverage and too much means you’re paying for something you’ll likely never need.
Great dance insurance plans split the difference perfectly, providing a stout level of protection without going overboard. After many years in the business of insuring dance teachers, our limits are set to provide just this.
With Insure Fitness Group, liability insurance for dance instructors provides the following plan limits:
- General liability - $1 million per occurrence, $3 million individual annual aggregate
- Professional liability - $1 million per occurrence, $3 million individual annual aggregate
- Product liability - up to $1 million
- Rental damage coverage - up to $100,000
- Stolen/damaged equipment coverage - $1,000 with $250 deductible
- Identity Protection Plan - $25,000 in identity restoration services
Getting the best value for your dance instructor insurance plan means getting the coverage you need at a competitive rate. Being prudent with setting limits based on the real types of risks facing dance teachers today is how our policy accomplishes both simultaneously.
Sign Up for Dance Instructor Liability Insurance
At Insure Fitness Group, all we do is protect dance instructors and other fitness professionals with the best coverage available for today’s environment. Signing up only takes a few minutes and you’ll enjoy full access to your plan documents and benefits once complete.
