Inquiry Ordered in Molestation Case

Los Angeles schools Supt. Sid Thompson on Thursday called for a thorough investigation of the district’s actions that resulted in a $1.2-million verdict against it in a molestation lawsuit, after an article in The Times prompted questions about the case and the district’s defense tactics.

Last month a jury found the Los Angeles Unified School District negligent for failing to adequately protect an 8-year-old boy who was molested in April 1994 in the bathroom of his elementary school by an 11-year-old with a history of psychological problems.

“I’m giving the attorneys and everyone involved the benefit of being able to explain what happened,” Thompson said Thursday. “But I’m deadly serious about getting to the bottom this.”

Thompson said the investigation will focus on whether school and district officials did all they could to prevent the incident and whether they responded appropriately in the aftermath.

The Times reported that records available to 59th Street School, to which the older boy had transferred from Arkansas, documented his background of violence, severe emotional problems and inappropriate sexual behavior. In addition, the boy had been accused of molesting another 8-year-old a month before the assault that triggered the suit.

Yet school officials did not complete a required psychological evaluation of the child--which could have allowed them to place him in a restricted classroom--until after the second assault. And the principal failed to inform the boy’s teacher of the first attack, in violation of state law.

That lack of notification prompted the teachers union to begin its own review of legal remedies on Thursday. Under a law United Teachers-Los Angeles helped write, which passed months before the 59th Street assaults, administrators can be charged with a misdemeanor for failing to tell teachers that their students have been accused of violent or obscene acts.

“As a parent, I am totally flabbergasted by this,” said UTLA Vice President John Perez. “I don’t know if the principal was at fault or . . . somebody else was at fault, but somebody did not do what they were supposed to do.” The 11-year-old was a special education student who had been assigned a full-time aide in his Arkansas district, but was left alone in a regular class in Los Angeles, with only an hour a day of reading help--a placement that was never evaluated despite a state law requiring special education students to be assessed within 30 days of moving to a new district.

The civil damages suit was not the first legal action charging that Los Angeles Unified handled the assessment and placement of disabled students poorly. In fact, that allegation was at the heart of a class-action suit against the district, settled last year when the district admitted its shortcomings and promised to spend millions overhauling its special education system.

During the trial of the molestation civil suit, the school district’s lawyers employed a controversial defense, blaming the victim and his parents for worsening his trauma by overreacting to the 1994 incident. One expert witness hired by the district suggested that the assault might have actually been “exciting and thrilling” to the boy.

A confidential memo faxed to school board members late Wednesday under Thompson’s signature explained that the expert witness was merely describing how “victims often experience conflicting emotions about their experiences and that recovering would have progressed more quickly had the child been allowed to express all the emotions he might have had about the incidents.”

“Board members should be assured it is not ever our philosophy to demean or degrade a child who is a plaintiff,” the memo concluded.

Board President Jeff Horton said Thursday he is very concerned about the district’s handling of the case, but would not comment further until after a closed session meeting on the subject, scheduled for Sept. 30.

The only other board member who responded to requests for interviews, David Tokofsky, said he will push for a sweeping investigation into district legal practices. Like many public agencies, the district farms out much of its legal work to outside firms specialized in specific kinds of cases. The 59th Street School case was defended by the firm Schell & Delamer, hired after consultation with the district’s insurance division.

“If we’re going to do an investigation, we need a blue-ribbon committee of outside legal experts to look at how the district spends . . . the public’s dollars on legal fees,” Tokofsky said. “How are we farming these out? How much are we paying? Are they managing it well?”