The Reckoning Has Come for K-12 Sex Abuse, and You the Taxpayer Are on the Hook

Sexual abuse of students by faculty and staff is rapidly turning into an expensive proposition – for taxpayers supporting the schools.

The teenage female athletes at California’s Pomona High School said they felt special when a handful of coaches there took them under their wing, spending more time with them than others, providing extra encouragement, sharing personal stories and, sometimes, seemingly harmless flirtatious talk.

One track team member was amazed at a Nevada meet when she saw the coaches drinking, smoking marijuana, and sharing the party scene with teammates. But that attention turned to tragedy at a subsequent meet in Las Vegas when a coach brought the 16-year-old to his hotel room, plied her with alcohol, and, she says, raped her.

She mentioned the assault to administrators at the time and the principal assured her the matter would be handled. Instead, the coach kept his job and she endured so much ridicule she wound up leaving California.

Decades after the 1997 incident, her tragedy turned to triumph when a Los Angeles jury awarded her $35 million for pain and suffering in a civil trial this January – made possible when the California legislature in 2020 opened a three-year window in which adults could bring litigation for sexual abuse they suffered as children.

And that’s not the only penalty the Pomona Unified School District taxpayers and insurers face from those reckless 1990s: Seven other former students have alleged abuse by the coaches, leading to three other lawsuits that have been settled privately and a fifth that remains active.

A long timeline from abuse incident to trial

The long timeline from the incidents to settlement or trial, and the thumping amounts the Pomona Unified School District was hit with, reflect a new willingness to acknowledge and punish sexual predators. In the wake of the #MeToo movement and infamous cases such as those involving Catholic priests, Hollywood, and top-tier sports, momentum is building for what might comprise the biggest group of victims in sexual misconduct scandals: K-12 students victimized by teachers and other school employees.

A review of insurance industry reports, legal blogs and media accounts by RealClearInvestigations turned up $1.2 billion in settlements for school districts in the last decade. And there are clear indications that the pace and amount of legal liability has been rising, along with the impact that has for taxpayers and schools.

In 2021, for example, the insurance entity United Educators reported nine K-12 sexual misconduct settlements of a million dollars or more in seven states, totaling $38.6 million. Those figures rose to a dozen in 2022, totaling $233.3 million, before exploding last year. In 2023, UE reported on 19 such K-12 settlements that amounted to more than $325 million. Only one of those cases – a $50 million settlement against the now defunct Miracle Meadows School in West Virginia – involved a private school.

A lot of abuse coming into the light of day

“I think we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg,” Oregon attorney Peter Janci told RealClear-Investigations. “There has been a lot of abuse that happened in schools, and there are more coming forward every day as public education and the sentiment to support victims has grown.”

Janci won a $3.5 million settlement against the St. Helens School District in March, the highest figure yet awarded in Oregon in a case involving sexual misconduct by school employees. He said that case and many others reflect years of shifting ideas about how victims of sexual misconduct are perceived and a growing awareness of the scale of the problem.

“Historically, there weren’t as many cases because of the stigma and because the deck was stacked against the victims,” Janci said. “Often we see this time lag where the victims have been struggling with what happened, and the biggest change now is kids are coming forward. Nationally, this trend is just now hitting the K-12 public school sector with the same force.”

Some of the once most respected institutions in the U.S. now face ruinous economic prospects after being engulfed by similar litigation. The Boy Scouts of America and some dioceses of the Roman Catholic Church have declared bankruptcy after grappling with thousands of lawsuits filed by people alleging sexual abuse at the hands of officials of those organizations.

Bankruptcies

The Boy Scouts are insolvent after a $2.4 billion settlement on more than 80,000 lawsuits, while the Catholic Church is still wrestling with the fallout from its long-term harboring of predatory priests, with their current legal bill standing at $3 billion. The totals for K-12 public school districts could potentially exceed those, given there are nearly 17,000 such districts in the U.S. with close to 50 million students today.

The exposure for the nation’s schools may be much greater, though the extent is unclear. News reports offer a steady of stream of articles about teachers arrested for molesting students – though those typically involve young, attractive female instructors and not men, who are more often the perpetrators. As RCI has previously reported, the Biden administration reversed Trump-era requirements that that Department of Education collect data on incidents of sexual misconduct. In the face of fierce criticism, the department backtracked and says that at present, it “has no data.”

One of the few academic studies on the subject – a 2004 report Hofstra University researchers prepared for the DOE – estimated that one in 10 K-12 students suffer some form of verbal or physical sexual misconduct from school employees. The vast majority of incidents never result in an arrest or trial.

Staggering penalties

While there is no nationwide clearinghouse of information for how much money has been awarded in these cases, staggering penalties have mounted in the past four years: $121.5 million against the Moreno Valley, California, system; $102.5 million in the Union School District in San Jose, California; and nearly $88 million in various Long Island districts. Those have been accompanied by scores of smaller settlements, ranging from several hundred thousand dollars to $50 million.

The annual “large loss reports” prepared by United Educators cover a variety of areas where losses topped $1 million since 2021. Each year, the single largest category has been sexual misconduct cases. In 2021, UE said, those represented 10% of large losses it tracked. By 2023, sexual misconduct accounted for 25% of such cases, although that includes higher education litigation and a handful of incidents involving student-on-student misconduct.

To some extent, the rising totals reflect the surge in cases after some state legislatures, like California’s, opened new windows in which former victims could sue public entities for long-ago abuse.

Ignoring the problem

The cases also reveal a pattern in which school officials either ignored or downplayed warning signs that teachers, coaches, bus drivers or volunteers were engaged in problematic situations with students. The record is also dotted with predators who claimed victims at more than one school, having dodged flares at one place only to work again at another, a phenomenon advocacy groups call “passing the trash.” These patterns emerged in 78% of United Educators’ 2021 cases, although it fell to 42% in 2023.

Last year, the Sacramento Unified School District was hit with a $52 million settlement stemming from the abuse of at least eight elementary school students that led to a former aide being sentenced in 2016 to 150 years to life in prison. In that case, court papers said, administrators blew off myriad complaints from parents alleging the aide offered the students “secret candy” and “prizes,” and some of those who ignored complaints were in turn promoted by the district.

“That is what complicity of silence has rendered in our nation’s schools,” said Terri Miller, president of the advocacy group SESAME (Stop Educator Sexual Abuse Misconduct & Exploitation).

“We hear too often how our school systems are struggling for money to afford paying teachers well, repair/build schools, provide supplies to classrooms, etc.,” Miller told RCI in an email. “If only they would address this appalling problem they have chosen to ignore or hide, they would spare child suffering and decrease the astronomical dollars spent on lawsuits and legal fees.”

Percentage of Victims by Job Title of Alleged Offender

Another partial accounting, maintained by Public Justice, shows settlements in 14 states between 2013 and 2019. All told, Public Justice’s Student Civil Rights Project tracked 304 K-12 settlements in sexual misconduct and bullying cases. From that, RCI culled 41 cases that involved school employees and students.

Public Justice shows California as the state with the most such settlements, recording 21 there between 2013 and 2019, totaling $408.7 million. In two-thirds of those cases, school officials failed to recognize or act on warning signs that employees were crossing boundaries with students, according to the lawsuits. While Public Justice shows settlements in 14 states during that same timeframe, the most any state outside of California showed was three – in Iowa, New Jersey, and New York – amounting to $22.1 million.

Neither Public Justice nor United Educators responded to RCI’s request for comment.

“What we’ve seen is the statute of limitations on sexual abuse charges extended up to ten years in many states,” said Vincent Nappo, a plaintiffs’ attorney in Washington state. He praised the state’s “very progressive tort law.”

Nappo has won multiple settlements against Washington school districts in sexual misconduct lawsuits, including a $9.5 million settlement in 2022 against the University Place School District.

Repeated abuse

That district, a sliver of Tacoma, has been hit with multiple lawsuits stemming from a volunteer wrestling coach who was at the school from 2005 to 2007. Nappo’s settlement involved three students, between 14 and 16 years old at the time, who said they were abused by the coach at an off-campus training camp he held. The coach had been convicted of sexual misconduct with students back in 1977, according to court papers, a record the district did not uncover at the time he was hired. A police complaint from parents in 2014 had been dismissed by cops because the statute of limitations had expired.

What happened at University Place was a failure of common sense, not a lack of proper procedures – something all too prevalent in the school system for decades, Nappo said.

“It’s good that we’ve opened the courts to these claims, but I think this all is going to need some more time to play out, because the abuse and the crimes in many cases happened back in the ’80s or ’90s,” he said. “And what you find is that most of these predators are or were well-liked in their place of employment.”

Taxpayers pay

One way or another, taxpayers are financing these settlements, through higher costs or redirection of money that could go to education or other municipal services. In Pomona Unified’s case, for example, taxpayers will foot 60% of the total over five years. In University Place District’s settlement, insurers have thus far met the full cost, which currently stands at $13.5 million, according to Superintendent Jeff Chamberlin, who was not in that post when the sexual misconduct occurred.

While Nappo insisted he “hasn’t seen any insurance companies in the soup line lately,” Chamberlin said the current environment is fraught with danger for schools and taxpayers.

“In Washington, there’s been a series of laws that created a thriving industry of lawsuits,” Chamberlin told RCI. “Generally, there’s just a real fear of jury verdicts. They are awarding astronomical settlements and sooner or later it will be the taxpayer who is paying these.”

“This Has Spiraled Out of Control Nationally”

“You have to understand the fiscal landscape of all this,” he said. “So far, our policy has been sufficient, but I do worry that at some point in the future we’ll be unable to get insurance. The lawsuits now cover a range of behaviors, and this has spiraled out of control nationally.”

Some districts are paying more than others, especially in California. RCI reached out to a half dozen of the K-12 public school districts that have dealt with multiple lawsuits, including the Los Angeles Unified School District which, according to a Los Angeles Times story in April 2023, has paid nearly $400 million in settlements involving sexual misconduct by employees.

Since then, LAUSD has been hit with even more settlements, including $19.9 million in an elementary school abuse case last November, and a $13 million deal in February stemming from a special needs assistant teacher’s conduct in 2014.

The LAUSD said it had “nothing at this time,” in response to questions about its history of lawsuits and settlements. The other school districts, including Clark County School District in Nevada, which last year settled a $9 million case tied to a convicted sex offender who drove a bus for special needs students, did not respond to requests for comment.

Liquidation

The tab for all this is being shifted to the public in various ways, from higher insurance premiums and legal bills to the liquidation of public assets. In Long Island, for instance, the Cold Springs Harbor school district voted to drain a $7.7 million capital fund to pay settlements and legal fees after it reached a $14 million deal in the case of two students who alleged a teacher sexually abused them in the 1980s.

That lawsuit and others came about because New York opened the window in which such litigation could be filed. The Child Victims Act in 2019 extended the deadline for when sexual abuse claims could be filed in state or federal courts. The act, which former Gov. Andrew Cuomo extended for another year after COVID shutdowns in 2020, allowed people up to the age of 55 to file suit. That window closed in November 2022.

“But those cases are now all coming to fruition,” said Jeffrey Fritz, a Philadelphia attorney who specializes in sexual misconduct litigation and represented victims of Jerry Sandusky, an assistant football coach at Penn State convicted of serial child molestation through a youth charity he founded.

“There’s been a sea change in the way people look at these things, and we’ve become much more aggressive about rooting it out,” Fritz told RCI. “You now have the law playing catch-up in terms of justice.”

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.