Peggy Ann Buckey to Resume Teaching

Peggy Ann Buckey, a former defendant in the McMartin Pre-School molestation case, will resume her career as a special education teacher for the Anaheim-Union High School District in Orange County next week.

Buckey, 32, will teach a small class of junior and senior high school students with learning and communication disorders at Trident Center, one of the district’s alternative schools, Supt. Cynthia Grennan said.

Buckey’s teaching credentials were reinstated last week by the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing after a lengthy hearing in which an administrative law judge ruled that there was no reason to keep her out of the classroom.

Before her arrest in 1984 on child molestation charges involving youngsters who attended her family’s McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach, Buckey was a special education teacher at Kennedy High School in La Palma.

Although she was ordered to stand trial after a preliminary hearing, Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner dropped all charges against her and four other teachers in early 1986. The trial of her mother and brother has been in progress for nearly two years.