A California school district has settled for $2.25 million in its second sexual abuse lawsuit against a former English teacher, soccer coa...
A California school district has settled for $2.25 million in its second sexual abuse lawsuit against a former English teacher, soccer coach, and convicted sex offender.
The Redlands Unified School District's settlement comes after a lawsuit against Laura Whitehurst, who was arrested in 2013 for sexual misconduct. The recent settlement brings the total amount paid to $8.25 million, all of which has been paid out to Whitehurst's victims, according to the Press-Enterprise.
The report noted that in 2016, the district agreed to pay $6 million to a former Citrus Valley High School student who had apparently impregnated Whitehurst.
The latest lawsuit was filed in 2021, when a former Redlands High School student alleged that he was sexually preyed upon and abused at the school by Whitehurst in 2007, according to the plaintiff's attorney, Morgan Stewart.
The former student claimed that other teachers, counselors, and administrators failed to report the revelations to the police.
“On behalf of our very brave client, we are pleased to get to this resolution. It is unfortunate that Redlands Unified forced him to go through litigation despite knowing that they had failed to protect him from a serial pedophile,” Stewart said in an email Friday, according to the report.
“I would hope they have learned their lesson, but given a significant number of additional recent claims, it is evident that they have not.”
The abuse allegedly took place when the former student was just 14 years old. Whitehurst admitted in 2013 that she had had sexual relations with the student 10 to 15 times in her classroom and at her Redlands apartment.
Whitehurst subsequently taught and coached at Citrus Valley High School, where she preyed upon male students there. One of the students she had sexual relations with there impregnated her, which led to her arrest on July 1, 2013.
She was convicted of four felony counts of unlawful sexual intercourse and two counts of oral copulation involving a total of three victims. She was sentenced to a year in county jail in August 2013, according to the Sun.
The fallout of Whitehurst's arrest rocked the school district, which eventually revealed a decades-long pattern by district teachers and administrators of actively covering up or failing to report incidents to the authorities. The findings were discovered during a 14-month investigation by the Southern California News Group in 2018 and 2019, per the Press-Enterprise.
The revelations also sparked an investigation by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing into a former Clement Middle School principal who reportedly surrendered her teaching credentials on September 1 after it was discovered that there was probable cause to censure her.
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