Payouts to students who have been molested and who’ve accused the Los Angeles Unified School Districts of ignoring the presence of problem teachers have surpassed $300 million in the last four years.
The nation’s second-largest school system has been plagued in recent years by a series of cases in which officials missed indications of teacher misconduct, and in some instances, continued to employ teachers who were under a cloud, or ignored or overlooked direct complaints, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.
LAUSD officials acknowledge past mistakes but insist they have taken strong measures and now have some of the most extensive policies for preventing and uncovering abuse, according to The Times. But a pattern has emerged: The district announces measures to make students safer, only to discover a new weakness in the system or to find that policies were not followed, the newspaper reported. And predators keep surfacing.
Amid a trail of victimized students and massive payouts to victims and attorneys, abuse-related settlements have gone beyond $300 million in just the last four years, according to The Times.
The district’s most expensive abuse case involves Mark Berndt, a former teacher at Miramonte Elementary School south of downtown L.A. The district has spent $200 million on claims made by students, and more cases are outstanding.
The size of settlements are also creeping upward. The largest payment to one victim was $6.9 million in 2012 to a boy repeatedly sexually abused by former Queen Anne Place Elementary teacher Forrest Stobbe.
—City News Service