The State - News from April 7, 1988

A Los Angeles judge refused to order the state to renew the teaching credential of a former defendant in the McMartin Pre-School molestation case. However, Superior Court Judge Miriam Vogel told a lawyer for the state Commission on Teaching Credentials that the panel has 60 days to hold a hearing on whether to recertify Peggy Ann Buckey, 31, who was charged in 1984 with eight counts of immoral conduct stemming from the alleged molestation of children at the Manhattan Beach preschool. Charges against her were dismissed two years later. Buckey’s brother and mother are currently on trial on 100 counts of child molestation in the McMartin case. Buckey, the granddaughter of the school’s founder Virginia McMartin, was a tenured special education teacher in the Anaheim Union School District at the time of her arrest. She was suspended, but not fired, and her teaching credential expired.