The Los Angeles Unified School District has agreed to pay $30.5 million to 19 more students who said they were victims of Mark Berndt, a convicted serial child molester, bringing the amount the district has paid out in connection with his crimes to more than $200 million, attorneys said Thursday.<\/p>\n
The alleged victims were third-, fourth- and fifth-graders in Berndt\u2019s classroom at Miramonte Elementary School between 1988 and 2011. The lawsuits allege that they were sexually harassed, abused and molested on multiple occasions, and in an infamous incident, some were fed cookies containing his semen. Berndt was arrested in 2012<\/a> and is serving a 25-year prison sentence for sex crimes involving students.<\/p>\n \u201cFourteen years later, victims are still coming forward, and that is remarkable,\u201d said attorney Morgan Stewart. \u201cThe red flags were obvious here, and we are seeing more cases where the reports are ignored.\u201d<\/p>\n The litigation, he said, will give the victims some degree of the accountability they seek.<\/p>\n He said LAUSD is among the entities now trying to get state lawmakers to limit settlements by changing laws around victim compensation.<\/p>\n Berndt, a third-grade teacher, pleaded no contest in 2013 to 23 counts of lewd conduct. The allegations against him included that he fed children his bodily fluids in what he called a \u201ctasting game.\u201d<\/p>\n Berndt taught at Miramonte from 1979 to 2011, when investigators began to look into his conduct based on photos turned in to police, some of which showed<\/a> students blindfolded, with tape over their mouths.<\/p>\n The lawsuits that were settled allege Miramonte administrators and LAUSD officials ignored multiple complaints by parents, students and teachers regarding Berndt dating to the early 1980s.<\/p>\n In 1983, a parent complained that Berndt, then 32, had dropped his pants during a student field trip to a museum.<\/p>\n In 2014, LAUSD agreed to pay about $139 million \u2014 believed to be the largest payout ever by a school system in a child abuse case at the time \u2014 to resolve legal claims from 69 Miramonte parents and 81 students who accused Berndt of lewd acts. The district also paid about $30 million in claims to the families of 65 Miramonte students.<\/p>\n L.A. Unified replaced the entire staff at Miramonte in the second half of the school year, and all employees were required to review the abuse-reporting rules.<\/p>\n Last year, the district sold $500 million in bonds to pay for past alleged sexual misconduct \u2014 loans that must be paid back over time by the school system \u2014 part of a blizzard of claims dating back as far as the 1970s that are affecting government entities, churches and private organizations up and down the state. Earlier this year, the LAUSD approved an additional $250 million<\/a>.<\/p>\n LAUSD is not the only public entity to approve massive settlement payouts, however. California lawmakers enacted a law in 2020 that led to an unprecedented wave of litigation across nearly 1,000 public school districts. Scores of former students have come forward with allegations of rape and molestation dating to the 1950s.<\/p>\n More than 1,100 alleged victims have sued, with about $700 million in sexual misconduct settlements being paid out so far. <\/p>\n Behind the scenes in the state Capitol, a battle is now raging over efforts to curtail the litigation and cap payouts driven by the teachers union, cash-strapped school districts, and other public entities, including Los Angeles County, which are bitterly opposed by trial lawyers and victim advocates.<\/p>\n Those seeking to shut down the lawsuits have proposed a statute of limitations and high standards of evidentiary proof for sexual abuse litigation and a noneconomic damages cap under certain circumstances. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Los Angeles Unified School District has agreed to pay $30.5 million to 19 more students who said…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294029,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[4579,48,52,51,81403,17248,721,1846,81143,10803,47,50,49,125091,49973,103775,85439,4574,125092,2601,72],"class_list":["post-294028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-district","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-late-settlement","tag-lausd","tag-law","tag-lawsuit","tag-legal-claim","tag-litigation","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-mark-berndt","tag-miramonte","tag-public-school-district","tag-school-system","tag-student","tag-third-grade-teacher","tag-victim","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294028\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}