Anguish of School Molestations Lingers : Child abuse: A $6-million settlement is near for South-Central L.A. students. But their teacher’s crimes have changed lives and laws.

In a rough corner of South-Central Los Angeles, where thugs rule the streets with their drugs and their guns, David Huff long ago made a promise to himself: If he accomplished anything as a father, it would be to give his daughter a chance to break out of the ghetto.

Education, he thought, was the way. So he sat by her side as she did her homework at night. He bought her a secondhand piano in the hope that she might develop an interest in music. He warned her of the dangers of gangs, and he walked her to school each day to make sure she got there safely.

But there was one danger David Huff was not on the lookout for, and it surfaced in the classroom, the very place he had hoped would be his child’s salvation.

Nearly six years ago, Huff’s daughter became ensnarled in a child molestation case that shocked the Los Angeles Unified School District like no other before or since. Along with more than a dozen other young girls at the 68th Street School--all of them from poor, black inner-city families--the Huff child, then in the third grade, was sexually abused by her teacher.

The crimes, for which teacher Terry E. Bartholome is serving 44 years in prison, were devastating not only because of the number of children involved, but because school officials had been alerted to allegations about Bartholome nearly three years before he was arrested. Instead of removing him from the classroom, they simply transferred him from that school to 68th Street. A top school administrator was successfully prosecuted for failing to report the abuse, although his conviction was overturned on appeal.

Now, the child victims are on the verge of receiving the largest civil settlement in school district’s history--a $6-million award that will be invested and eventually grow to $23 million.

The legal wrangling is expected to end later this month with a judge’s approval of the settlement. But the Bartholome case is far from over; it has left a dramatic and lasting impression on the school district, prompting a heightened awareness of child abuse and an increased emphasis on reporting it. It has resulted in an amendment to state law. And it has had an incalculable emotional impact on everyone who has come into contact with it--lawyers, school principals and administrators, and especially the young victims and their families.

“The system failed these kids,” said lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., who represented the 35 plaintiffs--16 children and 19 parents and guardians. “But the same system that failed them has now come to their assistance. They have now got a chance to right their lives.”

Richard K. Mason, special counsel for the school district, said he hopes the money will help close the book on a “tragedy (that) is still felt because of the terrible things that were done to these young people. . . . I don’t think the effects of this case will leave us for a long time.”

Few can speak to this as eloquently as David Huff.

He calls himself “a professional parent,” having given up his cab driving business to raise his daughter after his marriage broke up. Sitting in the small living room of his apartment, the roar of the nearby Harbor Freeway filtering in through open windows, Huff says he fears his dream--that his daughter may someday attend college--is slipping away.

Her grades, once all A’s and B’s, are on the decline. Now 14, she is becoming a discipline problem in school. Her father says her experience has left her angry with authority: “She thinks her judgement is far superior to many adults.”

Huff is angry too. Angry with Bartholome, with the school district, with himself.

“I let her down,” he said, staring off in the distance to keep his dark eyes from overflowing with tears. “I should have seen it. Why were my defenses so down? Why wasn’t I suspicious? Why shouldn’t I have suspected everybody, rather than the thugs and the gangsters running up and down the street, who I’m on alert for? How did I let a puny little teacher get past me like this?

” . . . This man put his hands on my daughter’s body and her mind,” Huff said with disgust. “He probably caused her mind more damage than can ever be repaired.”

According to L. Scott Frazier, a Beverly Hills psychotherapist who evaluated all 16 children represented in the civil suit, the youngsters who were molested by Bartholome are still suffering a range of symptoms. Some are still in therapy, he said.

“We had several girls who could not work well in a man’s class,” Frazier said. “Some are suffering from really strong depression. Others are suffering from not only depression but a loss of confidence in authority. . . . And then, of course, you’ve got the whole gamut of sexual problems that usually come up later in one’s life when there has been molestation.”

Parent Michelle Cage says her daughter, a quiet child who had tested as gifted when she was younger, has become withdrawn and refuses to talk about her experience. “Now she stays in the house a lot and she likes to read and she writes, but she don’t talk about it. I told her, ‘You need to get it out.’

” . . . There’s no price on what this man did to our children,” said Cage. “He stole a lot from them at an early age.”

According to testimony at his trial, Bartholome masturbated in front of his students, encouraged them to fondle his genitals and rubbed against them in a lewd way. He was convicted of 19 felonies and 11 misdemeanors involving 13 children who were molested over a 13-month period ending in December, 1984. He was acquitted of five counts and the jury deadlocked on an additional 10 charges, including attempted rape and oral copulation involving a first-grade student.

By the time Bartholome was arrested in 1985, he had amassed a checkered resume. When he was hired by the district in 1967, a background check turned up the fact that he had been arrested five years earlier on charges of exposing himself to a group of nurses in Tacoma, Wash. In 1975, while he was teaching at an elementary school in Woodland Hills, parents and teachers accused him of anti-Semitic behavior.

In 1982, several years after Bartholome abandoned a failed ice-skating rink venture to return to teaching, two successive principals at the 107th Street School in South-Central Los Angeles received reports that Bartholome had been molesting students there. District officials said they investigated but did not find enough evidence to put together a case. Instead, Bartholome was transferred to the 68th Street School, where his pupils made similar complaints. Yet it was not until Bartholome himself confessed he was a pedophile that school officials, who were investigating children’s complaints, turned him in.

Of all the district employees who handled allegations against Bartholome--including three school principals, three regional administrators and a regional superintendent--only one was prosecuted under a California law that requires those entrusted with the care of children to report suspected child abuse within 36 hours to a child protective agency.

That was regional administrator Stuart N. Bernstein, a rising star in the school district who, some say, might have eventually become superintendent. Some of his colleagues were given immunity to testify against him, and others were not prosecuted because the statute of limitations had run out.

Ironically, it was Bernstein who reported Bartholome to school police, thus setting in motion the chain of events that led to the teacher’s arrest. But prosecutors said his efforts were too little, too late.

Bernstein was accused of failing to report complaints about Bartholome within 36 hours--instead waiting three weeks--and of turning to the wrong agency--the school police--for help. He was convicted in 1986 of a misdemeanor. But the conviction was overturned by an appeals court that ruled the trial judge had erred in instructing the jury that, at that time, the school police force was not a proper agency for reporting of child abuse. Although he was demoted after the charges were filed and left the district after his conviction, Bernstein has since been reinstated as a regional administrator on the city’s Westside.

Prosecutor Mary E. House said the Bernstein case was one of the most emotional she has ever tried. “I had people throwing things at me when I left the courtroom, saying, ‘You’ve ruined a man’s life.’ But I felt very strongly that he had not followed the law.”

Bernstein declined to be interviewed but said in a prepared statement that he was treated as a scapegoat and has never recovered from the trauma of the case.

“It’s impossible to assess the extent to which my personal and professional lives have suffered,” he wrote. “The pain that these events caused my wife, my children and my family at times was unbearable. . . . Even though I have been vindicated, I am going to have to live with the stigma of this experience for the rest of my life.”

Bernstein’s case prompted the state legislature to revise its child abuse reporting law to specifically state that school police departments are not considered child protection agencies. It also sparked an intense campaign within the school district to make certain all employees are familiar with the law and with district policy.

Those efforts are continuing. New school employees are required to view a videotape that informs them of their obligations to report child abuse, and they must sign a document stating that they will comply with the policy. Principals and other administrators are required to update their staffs on child abuse reporting at least twice a year.

Shayla Lever, who heads the district’s CARE (Child Abuse Recognition and Eliminate) program, said that after Bernstein’s conviction, the number of abuse reports skyrocketed as school employees scurried to protect themselves from possible prosecution. But such actions, she said, have given way to “a sincere concern for children and a sincere concern to do the right thing.”

Meanwhile, throughout the district there are people who are still affected by the Bartholome case.

Rita Walters, the Board of Education member whose district includes the 68th Street School, says that she remains haunted by the thought that Bartholome might have been yanked from the classroom far sooner if had he been teaching in a middle-class white neighborhood instead of a poor black one.

“That’s my nightmare,” she said in a recent interview. “I hope that it didn’t occur there just because they were poor children, but the fear that it did is certainly with me.”

Alice McDonald, the former principal at 68th Street School who was given immunity in exchange for her testimony against Bernstein, said the case is too painful to discuss. “It’s something that I’ve tried to put behind me,” said McDonald, now the principal at Toland Way Elementary School in Eagle Rock. “I don’t have the heart or the stomach for it.”

And at the 68th Street School, the case touches such a sensitive nerve that the new principal declined to allow a reporter even to visit the campus, deferring instead to district officials for comment.

Cochran, the children’s lawyer, said he hopes the money will “help them overcome what shouldn’t have happened to them in the first place.”

The structured settlement will be invested in funds for education, psychological counseling, special needs and a lifetime income for the children. The children will receive monthly checks in varying amounts for the rest of their lives including, at age 18, a “career training annuity” that will continue for five years to help pay for college or job training.

David Huff said he is thankful for the money. He said he hopes to use the funds to place his daughter in a private high school and perhaps in college later on, so that he can someday make good on the promise he made to himself so many years ago.

But like the other parents interviewed, Huff said he does not believe any amount can ever compensate for his daughter’s suffering. “How do you compensate for a bruised mind?” he asks. “This man killed her spirit. How do you compensate for that?”