educator sexual abuse Archives

The Department of Education (ED) launched an investigation into Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) earlier this month for failing to address educator sexual abuse.

The probe involves a concerning settlement agreement between LAUSD and the local teachers union, Unified Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA).

“[The agreement] appears to guarantee that teachers will be reassigned, not terminated or immediately removed from student facing roles while officials investigate, when they are credibly accused of [a variety of sexual offenses],” the department wrote in a press release.

The settlement, which LAUSD’s superintendent, associate superintendent, executive director and board signed with UTLA in 2024, agrees teachers will only face “reassignment” if they:

Sexually harassed a student or coworker.
Engaged in a sexual or romantic relationship with a student or another minor.
Communicated with students for non-school related purposes.
Created, sold or used child pornography.
Showed students pornography or other inappropriate material.
Engaged in unnecessary physical contact with a student.
Engaged in physical or non-physical contact with a student motivated by sexual interest.
Failed to report suspected child abuse.
Are the subject of an ongoing police investigation.

The department’s investigation will determine whether LAUSD, the second largest school district in America, violated Title IX, which prohibits public schools from engaging in sex discrimination.

“Under Title IX, schools must respond appropriately and address claims of sexual misconduct, including sexual harassment and assault, in a timely manner, but [LAUSD] seems to be putting the continued employment of sexual predators above the safety of students,” ED Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey wrote in the department’s press release.

“It is unconscionable that the district would simply ignore Title IX’s procedural requirements to protect teachers who cause life-changing harm to their kids.”

If the department finds LAUSD violated Title IX, the district could forfeit its more than one billion dollars in annual federal funding.

LAUSD and UTLA categorically deny the department’s allegations, claiming they hinge on a fundamental misunderstanding of the word “reassignment.”

LAUSD policy reviewed by The Hill defines “reassignment” as “the provisional removal of an employee from their regularly assigned workplace for the safety of district students, staff or the workplace.”

This can include:

Sending the employee home.
Relocating an employees’ worksite to investigate allegations of wrongdoing.
Issuing the employee a “stay-away” notice.
Suspending the employee pending dismissal.

“Reassignment” may not always refer to sending teachers to different schools, but LAUSD and UTLA still warrant investigation.

The district’s lack of specific disciplinary policies gives it unprecedented flexibility over how to treat educators accused of heinous crimes. Teachers credibly accused of selling pornography should not be “reassigned.” They should be suspended pending dismissal. Period.

Lack of specificity makes it difficult to hold LAUSD and UTLA accountable.

Consider the teachers union’s statement to CBS News: “Employees accused of misconduct involving students are reassigned to their homes while LAUSD and/or law enforcement conduct an investigation of the allegation.”

This is a half-truth. “Reassignment” can mean sending teachers accused of wrongdoing home. But, per the district itself, “reassignment” can also involve sending teachers to different work sites, which could presumably include other classrooms or schools.

The teachers union also told CBS, “[Teachers accused of wrongdoing] are not reassigned to another classroom or to any other setting where they would interact with students.”

This is a flat out lie.

The 2024 agreement being investigated by the ED added to a 445-page collective bargaining agreement established between LAUSD and UTLA in 2022.

The larger agreement does not require teachers accused of child abuse be removed from the classroom. Instead, administrators must disrupt the alleged victim by moving them to a different teacher’s class.

This policy is especially troubling given California law does not require schools notify parents if their child alleges a school employee sexually assaulted them, or if another student makes an allegation of sexual misconduct against their child’s teacher.

Unfortunately, this is far from the only troubling policy the Daily Citizen discovered in LAUSD and UTLA’s most recent collective bargaining agreement.

A teacher can be moved to a different school following an investigation.

If a teacher is to remain in district employment following an investigation into their conduct, the agreement requires LAUSD assess whether the employee be “assigned to his or her previous location.”

The paragraph concludes:

If for any reason that previous assignment is not available or deemed inappropriate, the employee shall be assigned to a comparable position in the same local district as the previous assignment.

The broad language in this paragraph gives LAUSD significant leeway to transfer employees who are not officially guilty of wrongdoing but may consistently receive complaints of misconduct.

Transferring school employees suspected of misconduct rather than firing them is known as “passing the trash.” Policies facilitating and incentivizing this practice often hide in collective bargaining agreements negotiated by teachers unions.

Intradistrict complaints may not be investigated.

The agreement requires LAUSD to investigate any complaint of employee wrongdoing submitted by a member of the public. In the following paragraph, the agreement reads:

If the document came from within district personnel, the investigation required by [the previous] paragraph may not be necessary or appropriate …

Why? Complaints about educator wrongdoing should be investigated equally, regardless of their origins.

No mention of mandatory reporting requirements.

California school employees must legally report all allegations, suspicions or accounts of child sexual abuse to law enforcement within 36 hours. Failure to do so can result in up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

But LAUSD’s 445-page collective bargaining agreement never mentions mandatory reporting laws. The Daily Citizen could find no instance where school employees are instructed to report child abuse to law enforcement prior to or concurrent with alerting the district.

In the collective bargaining agreement, LAUSD and UTLA even agree “factors such as investigations involving outside law enforcement agencies and/or the District Inspector General” may impact the organizations’ mutual desire to conclude investigations in fewer than 90 workdays.

Wouldn’t want the law to get in the way of an open and shut case.

Educators can “work off” offenses.

The agreement allows educators to strike some pre-disciplinary offenses from their record by successfully avoiding similar offenses.

California law prevents such “work off” programs for workplace offenses to do with child abuse or neglect, sexual harassment or egregious financial fraud. Employees are not supposed to be able to conceal these records, regardless of how long ago they occurred.

But LAUSD and UTLA negotiated a work around for this law. The agreement reads:

After achieving that passage of time [four years], if the document is retained by the administrator (as may be required by law), it should be kept in a separate “expired” file and not become a basis, in whole or part, for a subsequent formal disciplinary action.

This paragraph separates important pre-disciplinary documents from alleged offender’s files, in violation of California law, and forbids them from being considered in future disciplinary matters.

But failure to consider patterns of behavior notoriously enables educator sexual abuse.

Less than one month ago, LAUSD paid out $30 million to 19 more alleged victims of convicted child molester Mark Berndt, bringing the district’s total payout to Berndt’s victims to more than $200 million.

Berndt taught third grade at Miramonte Elementary School from 1979 to 2011. Parents began complaining about him as early as 1983, per the LA Times. Police finally arrested him in 2012.

Berndt is far from LAUSD’s only case of educator sexual abuse. Just this year alone, the district has agreed to pay out an additional $250 million to sexual assault victims.

It’s long past time for the Department of Education to investigate educator sexual misconduct. Given the deeply problematic agreement between LAUSD and UTLA, Los Angeles is the perfect place for the federal government to start taking a stand against “passing the trash.”

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Passing the Trash: Here’s What Parents Need to Know About Educator Sexual Misconduct

A California school district failed to properly investigate more than 100 allegations of sexual misconduct perpetrated against students by school employees over nearly a decade, investigators determined last month.

The disturbing findings are the latest development in what lawyer John Manly, who represents victims of sex abuse and assault, calls “an epidemic of sexual abuse in California by teachers, coaches and other school employees.”

California’s attorney general’s office began investigating El Monte Union High School District in late 2023 after Business Insider published “The Predators’ Playground,” a harrowing article documenting decades of educator sexual abuse at El Monte’s Rosemead High School.

The subsequent 18-month investigation, which concluded in March, determined El Monte “failed to conduct legally compliant investigations” into more than 100 cases of sexual misconduct allegations dating back to 2018.

The state also discovered at least five cases in which a staff member continued to abuse and harass students after another staffer failed to report either the perpetrator’s misconduct or allegations against the perpetrator.

School employees in California must legally report allegations, suspicions or accounts of child sexual abuse to law enforcement within 36 hours. Failure to do so can result in up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Yet, according to Manly, El Monte employees aren’t the only ones violating California’s mandatory reporting laws.

“In the vast majority of cases, the mandatory reporting statute is ignored and schools investigate [sexual misconduct allegations] themselves,” the attorney told investigative journalist Catherine Herridge in February.

“The problem when institutions or people investigate themselves, in my experience, is they rarely find themselves guilty.”

At a press conference on the El Monte investigation’s conclusion, California Attorney General Rob Bonta admitted he expects to confront similar cases in the future.

“I don’t think this will be the last case of this type, unfortunately,” he told reporters.

California school districts have lost more than $3 billion in sexual abuse cases since 2020, when the state extended its statute of limitations on crimes of child sexual abuse.

But Bonta also believes his office’s reforms can rehabilitate districts like El Monte.

“We think we’ve arrived at a model that can help districts that have failed systemically, transform,” he said.

El Monte will undergo a lengthy period of state supervision following the investigation, including:

State oversight of the district’s handling of sexual misconduct allegations.
Creating a list of all substitute teachers “found to have violated employee policy on appropriate boundaries with students.”
Training parents and students to better recognize signs of grooming and abuse.

The reforms compliment a new California law, which Governor Gavin Newsom signed in October 2025, creating a non-public database of school staff accused of misconduct.

While these provisions might well reduce educator sexual abuse in El Monte, they won’t “transform” it, or any other compromised districts, because they don’t address the legislative, cultural and institutional problems which perpetuate child predation in schools.

Most glaringly, Bonta’s model doesn’t address the reality that it is often faster and cheaper for schools to “pass the trash,” or shuffle school employees accused of sexual misconduct to other schools or districts, than it is to fire them.

“In public education in most states, it’s next to impossible to fire a bad teacher.” Manly tells Herridge. “They actually pay them to go away, even if they’ve sexually abused children.”

These predators get passed along to an average of three schools, often ending up in a low-income areas with a disproportionate number of vulnerable students and fewer parents with means to protect their children.

Bonta’s plan, which addresses district-by-district wrongdoing, cannot fix the fact that California law does not require schools notify parents if their child says a school employee sexually assaulted them or if another student makes an allegation of sexual misconduct against their child’s teacher.

California parents must also file a public records request to obtain any data about reported allegations of or disciplinary actions for sexual misconduct.

Manly puts it in perspective:

No one knows how many teachers have abused. Nobody knows how many teachers have been credibly accused. Nobody knows how many teachers in the state have been suspended or have had their licenses suspended. It’s completely opaque, and it shouldn’t be.

Bonta’s plan certainly doesn’t address the role teachers’ unions play in negotiating confidentiality clauses and non-disclosure agreements preventing schools from alerting future employers about sexual misconduct allegations against a former employee.

These structural problems allow educator sexual abuse to continue unchecked. Legislators and school officials must tackle them for district-by-district reforms like Bonta’s to be most effective.

Unfortunately, the epidemic of sexual abuse by school employees is not just in California. It’s a national issue — and has been for decades.

Charol Shakeshaft, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and the foremost authority on educator sexual abuse, estimates nearly 1 in 5 children (17%) in America experience sexual misconduct by a school employee.

The same obstacles that afflict California — passing the trash, failure to enforce mandatory reporting laws, lack of transparency and consistent reporting and predators using teachers’ unions as shields — plague every other state in the nation, too, to varying degrees.

The question isn’t whether there are victims; it’s whether schools will document victims’ claims and, subsequently, whether victims can take their cases to court.

Educator sexual abuse is prevalent and frightening. The Daily Citizen is buckling down to get you the information you need to protect your children. Stay tuned.

Additional Articles and Resources

Counseling Services

Abusive Relationships

Passing the Trash: Here’s What Parents Need to Know About Educator Sexual Misconduct