Someone Messed Up

Terry E. Bartholome, a teacher in the Los Angeles public schools, was sentenced to 44 years in prison last month after a jury found him guilty of sexually molesting third-grade pupils at the 68th Street School in South-Central Los Angeles. But police reports and other documents disclosed by The Times on Sunday conclusively show that much more was known much earlier about Bartholome’s behavior than had previously been thought and that school officials were negligent--or worse--in failing to take action against him.

More than five years before he was hired to teach in Los Angeles in 1967, Bartholome had been arrested in the state of Washington for lewd conduct, and while no charges were filed, he was ordered to undergo counseling. School authorities here knew about this arrest when they hired Bartholome in 1967 and when they rehired him in 1978 after he had voluntarily left.

While the arrest itself should not necessarily have barred him from employment, it should have raised a red flag when officials began receiving specific and detailed allegations against Bartholome in 1982. It didn’t. Instead they simply transferred the teacher to the 68th Street School, where new complaints began to be heard, eventually leading to his conviction for 19 felonies and 11 misdemeanors of abusive sexual behavior.

What went wrong here? An extensive investigation into the first set of charges turned up enough evidence to warrant more than a transfer. School officials have a heavy responsibility to protect the children placed in their care, but they succumbed in this case to bureaucratic inertia and fear of bad publicity. They put their own institutional needs above the needs of the children and then tried to protect themselves by lying about what they knew when about Bartholome’s conduct.

This is a shocking case of insufficient action by school authorities compounded by their effort to cover it up. The school district should not be allowed to escape responsibility by the bureaucratic shuffle in which everyone winds up blameless. Somebody messed up, and he or they should be called on the carpet for it. The school district failed to do what it should have.