The Los Angeles Unified School District has agreed to pay $30.5 million to 19 more students who said they were victims of convicted child molester Mark Berndt, bringing the amount paid by the district in connection with his crimes to more than $200 million, lawyers said Thursday.
The alleged victims were third, fourth and fifth grade students in Berndt’s class at Miramonte Elementary School between 1988 and 2011. The lawsuits allege that he was sexually harassed, abused and molested on multiple occasions and, in one infamous incident, some were fed cookies containing his semen. Berndt was arrested in 2012 and is serving a 25-year prison sentence for sex crimes involving students.
Lawyer Morgan Stewart said, “Fourteen years later, victims are still coming forward and that’s remarkable.” “The red flags were clear here, and we are seeing more cases where reports have been ignored.”
The trial will give victims some of the accountability they want, he said.
He said LAUSD is one of the entities trying to limit settlements by lobbying state lawmakers to change laws around victim compensation.
Berndt, a third-grade teacher, pleaded no contest to 23 counts of disorderly conduct in 2013. The allegations against him also include that he fed his bodily fluids to children, in what he called a “tasting game”.
Berndt taught at Miramonte from 1979 to 2011, when investigators began looking into his conduct based on photographs given to police, some of which showed students blindfolded and with duct tape over their mouths.
The lawsuits that were settled alleged that Miramonte administrators and LAUSD officials ignored numerous complaints from parents, students, and teachers regarding Bernadette dating back to the early 1980s.
In 1983, a parent complained that the 32-year-old Berndt had pulled down his pants during a student museum field trip.
In 2014, LAUSD agreed to pay approximately $139 million – considered at the time to be the largest payout by a school system in a child abuse case – to resolve legal claims by 69 Miramonte parents and 81 students who accused Berndt of indecent acts. The district also paid out nearly $30 million in claims to the families of 65 Miramonte students.
LA Unified replaced the entire staff at Miramonte in the second half of the school year, and required all employees to review abuse-reporting rules.
Last year, the district sold $500 million in bonds to pay for past alleged sexual misconduct — loans that must be paid back over time by the school system — part of a series of claims dating back to the 1970s that are affecting government entities, churches and private organizations up and down the state. Earlier this year, LAUSD approved an additional $250 million.
However, LAUSD is not the only public entity to approve large-scale settlement payments. California lawmakers enacted a law in 2020 that led to an unprecedented wave of litigation among nearly 1,000 public school districts. Several alumni of the 1950s era have come forward with allegations of rape and molestation.
More than 1,100 alleged victims have filed lawsuits, with nearly $700 million paid out in sexual abuse settlements so far.
Behind the scenes at the state Capitol, there is now a battle being waged by the teachers union, cash-strapped school districts and other public entities, including Los Angeles County, over litigation and efforts to reduce the cap payments, which are being bitterly opposed by trial lawyers and victim advocates.
Those seeking to end the lawsuits have proposed statutes of limitations for sexual abuse lawsuits and higher standards of evidentiary proof and, in some circumstances, non-economic damage limits.
