The Los Angeles Unified Faculty District pays $3.55 million to 2 extra people who allege they have been abused as college students by former trainer Mark Berndt, attorneys stated Monday.
One of many former college students at Miramonte Elementary Faculty, the place Berndt taught for many years, will obtain $1.85 million and the opposite will get $1.7 million beneath phrases of an settlement introduced by legal professional Morgan Stewart.
Their lawsuits alleged that Berndt sexually harassed, abused and molested them on a number of events from about 2004 to 2008.
L.A. Unified didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark Monday. The settlements didn’t embrace any admissions of wrongdoing by the district.
Berndt, a former third-grade trainer, was arrested in 2012 and pleaded no contest the next yr to 23 counts of lewd conduct. The allegations towards him included that he fed kids his semen in what he referred to as a “tasting sport.”
He was sentenced to 25 years in jail and stays behind bars.
Berndt taught at Miramonte from 1979 to 2011, when investigators started to look into his conduct based mostly on images turned in to police, a few of which confirmed schoolchildren blindfolded, with tape over their mouth, authorities stated.
The lawsuits that have been settled allege Miramonte directors and LAUSD officers ignored a number of complaints by mother and father, college students and academics relating to Berndt’s sexual misconduct with kids courting to the early Eighties.
In 1983, a guardian complained that Berndt, then 32, had dropped his pants throughout a pupil subject journey to a museum.
In 2014, the LAUSD agreed to pay about $139 million — believed to be the most important payout ever by a faculty system in a baby abuse case on the time — to resolve authorized claims from 69 Miramonte mother and father and 81 college students who accused Berndt of lewd acts. The district additionally paid about $30 million in claims to the households of 65 Miramonte college students.
“This settlement represents another chapter in a horrendous scandal,” Stewart stated. “Ten years after the most important sexual abuse settlement towards a public college district, it’s a persevering with reminder of the injury that outcomes when college officers select to disregard pink flags and complaints by college students and fogeys of a serial sexual predator.”
Within the wake of the Miramonte scandal, then-Supt. John Deasy eliminated greater than 200 academics from their school rooms throughout the district. Your complete workers at Miramonte was briefly changed within the second half of the college yr, and all workers have been required to overview the foundations on abuse reporting.
