Posted on 03/13/2013 2:44:28 AM PDT by Libloather
LOS ANGELES - The Los Angeles Unified School District has agreed to a multimillion-dollar settlement with 58 current and former students at a school where an ex-teacher was accused of taking bondage-style photos of pupils, a lawyer for the district said on Tuesday.
The settlement would resolve nearly half of the 129 claims filed by former students of Miramonte Elementary School, attorney David Holmquist said.
**SNIP**
Mark Berndt, the first of two former Miramonte teachers accused of molesting students there, made headlines when he was charged in January 2012 with 23 counts of lewd acts on children, all aged 10 and younger.
(Excerpt) Read more at usnews.nbcnews.com ...
The district ( taxpayer) gets to paid for these abuse cases?
Gee! I hope the teachers, principals, and superintendents involved get sued into oblivion.
Where do I sign up to get abused like this and collect half a million dollars?
I wonder how much of municipalities budgets go to paying off lawsuits? In our litigious society where you can sue someone because they said something that hurt your feelers (even if it’s true and justified) a greedy attorney can devastate someone’s life in a courtroom using his mouth and a few pieces of paper.
BTW -I’m not saying what the teacher did should not be punished; he should and harshly. My point is that someone’s always got to pay and pay big time on lawsuit like this that’s going to be paid with tax dollars. It’s not like $470K is going to fix the emotional damage done to those children. Money can’t fix everything. Unless you hear an attorney argue for it in a court of law.
So you both think that the kids, listed as under 10, should just “take it” and expect that all their life older people, powerful people can force them to do anything, because they are bigger or hold a postion of authority? It looks like you would like to “get in” on being abused or that suing a school, a scout leader, a priest has no value in slowing down abuse. Get a life.
All you have to do is register to be a student at one of these hellhole schools.
So you think that students who have been abused by this pervert shouldn’t receive damages?
No, off course not. I realize that your response was a knee-jerk reaction to my first post but i clarified my meaning in the post that followed because I realized it could have been taken out of context given that my statement was made online without visual cues to my intent.. My issue is with attorneys turning it into a circus for big $$$ and making taxpayers pay for it. I wonder how much their take was. That will tell you how much of their concern was genuine.
CLOSE PUBLIC SCHOOLS!
We all know how this plays out. The TAXPAYER will pay this claim and it won’t impact the school bureaucracy one bit. There will be no belt-tightening, other than by the taxpayer.
> So you think that students who have been abused by this pervert shouldn’t receive damages?
Yes. But the damage has already been done. Money can’t repair psychological damage or erase memories. Are the damages due to posing in bondage positions or did a sex assault or aggravated sexual assail occur? That would make a difference to me. Teacher should do life in prison or receive a death sentence with that many victims.
There is so much more abuse in public schools than the church, yet the MSM continues their meme that the church is the place where abuse is common.
as usual - the lawyers get most of the money and the victims divide a much smaller pot.
And this is the setup that is destroying many good things in our society.
The settlement should come out of the teachers/administrators retirement funds — CalPERS.
I think they should just move these teachers to a different school, don't you???
By the bye, the Catholic archdiocese of L.A. has agreed to pay another ten million dollars to sex abuse victims making a total of about 670 million dollars paid out so far.
It doesn’t make any difference if a sexual assault occurred or not. We had a teacher in my state go to jail for five years for just taking pictures of male students without their shirts on.
Monetary damages puts officials on notice that they better get a handle on what’s going on in their schools. It also allows the parents of the victims to remove their children from the public school system and have them educated somewhere else..
Bondage style photos??? Maybe the parents were in cahoots with the “teacher” to pull down this big payday. 30$ million from the taxpayer!!! What a country!
Did you read the article?
“Berndt is accused of taking bondage-style photos of students, some with large, live “Madagascar-type cockroaches” on their faces. In others, students were seen with spoons of semen held to their faces, according to authorities. He has pleaded not guilty.”
Or are you okay with this?
for boys and for 500000$ YES. Girls no. I would volunteer for this. Like I said this was a scam, a racket cooked up by a teacher and some parents to shake down the LA school system for 30 million. They are poor and want the money and the SSI checks and this too. Your thinking is from another era. These parents were in on it and ginned up phoney lawyers and phoney outrage
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