District to Pay $900,000 in Molestation

The Claremont school board and its insurer have agreed to pay $900,000 to a former high school student who was sexually abused by a teacher to settle a lawsuit contending that officials failed to heed a warning about the teacher’s conduct.

Attorneys for the Claremont Unified School District’s insurer and the former student said the settlement had been agreed upon and documents would be signed shortly.

Gary R. Gibeaut, attorney for Alliance of Schools for Cooperative Insurance Programs, said that under terms of the settlement, the school district will continue to deny any liability in the case.

The lawsuit is the latest in a series of suits against school districts alleging that the districts knew or should have known of potential sexual abuse and failed to investigate the allegations adequately.

“Principals and administrators want to believe it couldn’t happen in their town,” said David M. Ring, an attorney for the former student and her parents, who specializes in handling such cases.

The former student, identified as Jane Doe in the lawsuit, was a 17-year-old senior at Claremont High School when she was sexual abused by Lorna Korber, 39, a teacher who ran the peer counseling program. The girl shortly afterward revealed the abuse to a therapist, who contacted police.

Korber was arrested last fall and pleaded guilty in October to two felony counts of unlawful sex with the girl and providing her with marijuana. Korber, who was released from jail earlier this month, was also given a four-year suspended sentence plus five years’ probation.

The suit filed six months ago alleged that Claremont schools failed to properly investigate Korber after the principal got a letter from a substitute teacher saying she had talked to the student and believed the girl had a suspicious relationship with Korber.

The district should have known, the suit alleged, that Korber was involved with the student, based on the letter from teacher Amy Schaefer. In the letter, Schaefer noted that Korber called the student out of her class several times.

“It occurred to me at the time that she was trying to portray a closeness beyond that appropriate for a student-teacher relationship,” wrote Schaefer to Carrie Allen, Claremont High’s principal.

District officials, in a statement last year, said that prior to being contacted by police, the district had “no substantive or corroborated knowledge of any inappropriate conduct on the part of Ms. Korber.”

When Claremont police obtained the letter from Allen’s office, it contained a note stating that Allen had met with the student and that the case was closed.

The teenager did not tell Allen about the abuse, but the prosecutor in the case said the principal should have pressed harder.

“They dropped the ball,” said Christina Weiss, a deputy district attorney. “Schools need to be vigilant. Administrators need proper training. A kid is always going to tell you nothing unless you get them in the right setting.”

The former student’s parents in a statement Thursday called on the superintendent and the school board to raise public awareness of the problem.

“The suit was never about financial compensation,” they said. “Rather, we believe it was a necessary vehicle to raise the district’s consciousness toward issues concerning the manipulation of power by a teacher over his or her students and the failure of teachers and administrators to recognize and report such an abuse of power.”

Ring said the ordeal led the young woman, now 20, to temporarily drop out of college. She plans to return next year.

In recent years, there have been a number of civil suits filed on the heels of criminal charges in school sex-abuse cases, plaintiff and defense attorneys say.

Two years ago, Ring won a $10.8-million verdict for a boy from La Verne. Jurors found that Bonita Unified School District officials were negligent in supervision of an instructor who was sentenced to eight years in prison for molesting the boy. Later, as the case was appealed, a $3.75-million settlement was reached.

The boy was molested by teacher Jack Kelley, who was his soccer coach. According to Ring and a defense attorney, the case hinged on an anonymous letter from 1993 about Kelley’s behavior to officials and a 1989 school assessment that he had taken photos of the students without their parents’ permission. Jurors also saw a memorandum from a school principal to the school board dismissing the accusations.

Bonita Unified, which includes La Verne and San Dimas, last year paid $2.1 million to another female student after teacher David J. Dangleis was sentenced to three years in prison for having sex with her. The suit alleged that he had sex with two other school girls in 1991 and 1992. As part of the settlement, $100,000 was set aside for a districtwide training program to prevent and identify sexual abuse.