BDSM MEDIA NEWS!!!!
November 24, 2014
District pays $139 million in case where teacher took bondage photos of students.
Source: Chicagotribune.com. - Chicagotribune.com - USA
USA - LOS ANGELES - The Los Angeles school district has agreed to pay $139 million to families of students subject to sexual abuse by an elementary school teacher who took bondage-style photos of more than 100 pupils, school officials said on Friday.
The Los Angeles Unified School District and attorneys for the families settled all remaining litigation in the case involving the teacher as jury selection was underway for a trial in some of the cases. The school district had previously paid $30 million to settle dozens of other related lawsuits.
"Throughout this case, we have shared in the pain felt by these children, their families and the community," schools Superintendent Ramon Cortines said in a statement.
Mark Berndt, the 63-year-old teacher at the center of the litigation, pleaded no contest a year ago to 23 counts of lewd acts upon a child and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Investigators found he took bondage-style photographs of his young students, some with semen-laced cookies held to their blindfolded faces or cockroaches crawling on them.
The revelations of the abuse by the third-grade teacher at Miramonte Elementary School in a working-class area of Los Angeles touched off protests by infuriated parents shortly after his arrest in January 2012.
"By every measure the community has healed and the school is doing well. This is really the final chapter in that whole odyssey," said Dave Holmquist, general counsel for the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The latest settlements of $139 million and the previous agreements for $30 million that the district reached in civil litigation over Berndt's actions involve a total of about 150 children who were pupils of Berndt from 2005 onward, a spokesman for the district said.
So how come it went on for so long??? Sounds like a lot of people need to be held accountable. Please execute this guy to start with.
nowadays
A judge will determine how to distribute the settlement money among the families of the roughly 80 children involved in the latest agreement, based on such factors as how badly they were emotionally scarred and what kind of therapy they will need, attorneys for the district said.
The case triggered a review of employee files going back decades in an effort to rid the district of potential problem employees. L.A.
Unified also submitted, or resubmitted, hundreds of reports of alleged misconduct to the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing.
Reports of possible misconduct ballooned. The week before Berndt's arrest there were 19. The following week yielded 77, according to district records.
Then-Supt. John Deasy removed scores of teachers from their classrooms. A zero-tolerance policy for employee misconduct was enforced.
The teachers union charged that the district was overreacting, holding teachers allegedly involved in misconduct in what they called "teacher jails" for far too long without giving them information on their cases and unjustly firing other instructors.
L.A. Unified also temporarily replaced the entire staff at Miramonte in the second half of the school year, and required all employees to take a course on the reporting of abuse.
In January, the district assembled a team of experienced law enforcement investigators to take over probes into sexual abuse.
The team has since investigated dozens of new allegations and has operated at a quicker pace than when investigations were left to principals, according to figures provided by the district.
In direct response to the Miramonte case, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill earlier this year aimed at speeding the dismissal of public school teachers for gross misconduct.
At the center of the scandal was a teacher who was once invited to students' birthday parties and quinceañeras. Fond of Hawaiian shirts and class field trips, Berndt was known to hand out lollipops and silly nicknames. He joined children for dodgeball games, sent them holiday cards and managed to turn seemingly mundane topics into interesting lessons.
But in the fall of 2010, a drugstore photo technician processed a photo that showed a child blindfolded and gagged with clear tape. Other photos showed a spoon filled with a milky liquid, which was also seen in and around children's mouths. Los Angeles County sheriff's investigators began quietly looking into Berndt.
A detective found a spoon in Berndt's classroom trash can that looked like the one in the photos. It tested positive for traces of semen that matched Berndt's DNA.
Authorities later found that Berndt had been the target of a 1994 police investigation in which a girl accused the teacher of reaching toward her genitals while she was taking a test. Prosecutors had determined there was insufficient evidence to file charges.
Two women who said they had been Berndt's former students in the 1990s came forward after his arrest and said they saw the teacher masturbating behind his desk. They said they informed a school counselor who advised them to stop making up stories.
Other former students recalled to the Los Angeles Times that the teacher had a habit of putting his hand inside the waistband of his pants and that he often perched himself on the steps near the playground, his legs splayed wide.
Court documents released last month revealed that a parent had complained about Berndt as far back as 1983. The parent told the principal at the time that Berndt had dropped his pants during a student field trip to a museum. The principal made notes about the incident in a memo, but Berndt remained on staff.
"Thanks again for the support you gave me," Berndt wrote in a note to the principal. "I did learn at least one thing for sure! Not to take students to the museum while wearing baggy shorts!"
A 512-page report based on a two-year inquiry by the sheriff's department was also filled with allegations that Berndt touched children in a sexual manner and urged them to reciprocate. "There is a suggestion in the police report that Berndt watched videos of bondage of women, and that his taping of children was for Berndt some version of sexualized bondage," Judge Shepard Wiley wrote about the report.
In 2008, the district destroyed about 2,000 reports containing abuse allegations because officials determined that state law banned them from possessing the forms because of privacy rules, according to an L.A. Unified spokesman.
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www.chicagotribune.com.
