‘You need a policy where children aren’t told to keep secrets from their parents or other caregivers,’ he says.
‘You need a policy where children aren’t told to keep secrets from their parents or other caregivers,’ he says.
S ince late July, six California school districts have adopted a transparency policy that has state officials wigging out.
On its face, the parent-notification push at the local level would seem unnecessary, embedded as it is in state and federal law and ancient practice that parents are the primary authority in the lives of their children. That acknowledged, the six school districts have said teachers must notify parents before guiding their children through controversial gender-transitioning. Specifically, school officials have 72 hours to notify parents in writing if children ask to change their names or pronouns or use school facilities such as bathrooms or locker rooms that don’t match the sex they were assigned at birth.
The state sees that as a catastrophe. In announcing California v. Chino Valley Unified School District, state attorney general Rob Bonta put California’s case this way: Parent notification “places transgender and gender nonconforming students in danger of imminent, irreparable harm from the consequences of forced disclosures.” “These students are currently under threat of being outed to their parents or guardians against their express wishes and will,” he added.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond echoed Bonta’s claims, declaring that the parent-notification policy “may not only fall outside of privacy laws but may put our students at risk.” Hyperventilating reporters routinely claim that the policy would result in the “forced outing” of “at-risk youth.” One story featured UCLA law professor Jody Herman, who said that parent notification “gambles” with children’s lives. Leaders of the California Teachers Association have used Bonta’s legal filing as a license to flout local policies and conduct business as usual. They’re telling California’s 315,000 teachers that law and public safety allow — indeed, require — them to ignore the parent-notification policy.
Explicit in this language is a startling presupposition: Parents may pose a threat to their own children.
There’s also this implicit message: Government is better situated than parents are to guide children through puberty.
That leads plaintiff’s attorney John Manly to this surprising assessment: “Catholic bishops have actually done a better job in responding to the crisis of child sexual assault than California’s public schools do.”
Manly would know. For decades, the linebacker-sized Southern California trial attorney and former Navy intelligence officer has hunted child predators and won staggering settlements for their victims. He built his brand on eye-popping showdowns with the Catholic Church, including a record-setting $660 million settlement against the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in 2007. He negotiated similar settlements with the Diocese of Orange ($6.9 million), the Oregon-based Society of Jesus ($50 million), and the Diocese of Wilmington (a $77 million settlement).
It’s not just a Catholic thing for Manly. His firm also represented female gymnasts in the successful case against Michigan State University and U.S. Olympics team doctor Larry Nassar. He represented 234 plaintiffs in the case against former USC gynecologist George Tyndall.
There is of course a big difference between school employees’ keeping students’ gender transition from parents and anything approaching physical abuse. The former is ideological and misguided but most likely well intentioned; the latter is predatory. But Manly worries a culture of secrecy that allows the former will enable the latter. In California’s K–12 schools, Manly sees all the conditions for multimillion-dollar sexual-assault settlements — the sanctioned secrecy, the protection of powerful unions, and the presence of vulnerable kids. Balanced against the suddenly popular parent-notification policy is the state department of education’s guidance: School officials, including teachers, must hide students’ gender orientation from their own parents when requested.
“With rare exceptions,” the department says, “schools are required to respect the limitations that a student places on the disclosure of their transgender status, including not sharing that information with the student’s parents.”
That sort of secrecy has created “a horror show,” Manly says. “I’ve handled hundreds of public-school cases, and in the majority of those, perpetrators of molestation told their victims, ‘This is our secret. Don’t tell your parents. Don’t tell adults. Don’t tell anybody.’”
If you doubt him, Manly asks that you recall the story of Mark Berndt, the Los Angeles elementary-school teacher who molested at least 71 third-graders over several decades, cresting in a campaign of assault between 2009 and 2011. Berndt’s crimes were remarkable for many reasons but perhaps especially because he meticulously photographed them — and then left the film for development at his local CVS store, where a clerk who saw the photos alerted local police. The photos depict Berndt feeding cookies to his victims — cookies topped with his own semen. A connoisseur of bondage and discipline, Berndt blindfolded some of his diminutive victims and bound their hands with tape and photographed them in sexualized poses. He placed live cockroaches on the children’s faces. A sheriff’s investigation said his “highly assaulting” attacks included touching girls’ genitalia and exposing himself to his students.
When confronted with the evidence against him, Berndt, then 61, refused to resign; he knew that his teachers’-union contract made it nearly impossible to fire a teacher, even one convicted of serious felonies involving students. Berndt ultimately agreed to quit but only after squeezing Los Angeles Unified School District officials for a $40,000 payoff. When Berndt learned that felony convictions might imperil his pension, the United Teachers Los Angeles contract saved him again. Berndt would continue to earn about $4,000 per month (plus cost-of-living adjustments) while serving his 25-year sentence.
At trial, Manly showed that LAUSD officials knew that Berndt was trouble years before but did nothing. Their nonchalance cost the district $139 million to settle legal claims with 69 parents and 81 students.
Berndt’s case was unique only in the bizarreness of his violence. Manly can tick off, without reference to notes, a list of similarly horrific cases that involved secrecy between teachers and students. There was the Redlands Unified School District high-school teacher who seduced a 16-year-old boy. She swore him to secrecy and, when she discovered she was pregnant, demanded that the boy carry out his fatherly duties. The district settled the family’s claim for $6 million in 2016. In 2018, the same district paid $15.7 million to settle three other sex-abuse lawsuits involving eight children. In May 2018, nearby Torrance Unified School District paid $31 million to settle the claims of eight former students who said they were molested by their wrestling coach. That same month, the Corona-Norco Unified School District paid $3 million to a special-education student raped by a teacher’s aide for two years beginning when the student was just eleven.
The catalogue of abuse goes on and on, though you’d never know it from listening to state officials fixed on the unfailing virtue of public-school teachers and the universal danger posed by allegedly unfit parents — “extremists,” Bonta calls them. Irvine’s University High, Sacramento’s Mark Twain Elementary, San Diego’s upscale La Jolla High School — search any California school district (Santa Barbara, Redding, California’s Central Valley), and you’ll discover that sexual violence against children is rampant and unfolding behind a wall of official secrecy.
“The common thread [between the Catholic Church and public-school scandals] is secrecy,” Manly says. “You’re telling kids to keep sexual secrets, including gender issues, from their parents. It’s a bad idea. I’m telling you, sending that message to kids is a very, very bad idea. I can’t tell you how many more cases there will be where adults are telling children — their victims — ‘This is our secret.’”
What would he recommend?
“You need a policy where children aren’t told to keep secrets from their parents or other caregivers,” Manly says.
This sounds like the parent-notification policy now gaining purchase in local school districts — the policy Attorney General Bonta is suing to stop. But even if that policy survives California’s notoriously progressive courts, it will be too late for the scores of kids already abused by schoolteachers — perps whom Bonta, Thurmond, and teachers’-union leaders would prefer we forget.
Soon after we spoke, Manly texted me with good news: He was celebrating yet another settlement in the case of the Redlands Unified teacher who became pregnant after having sex with her 16-year-old student. “That’s almost $46 million collected to date against Redlands Unified,” he said.
The key phrase is “to date.”
“We’ve identified 14 other teacher perpetrators in Redlands since then — five convicted and two to be indicted presently.” Those cases include “50-plus victims,” he says.
You’d think this ongoing scandal in the nation’s largest public-school system — the sexual assault, the cover-ups, the climate of secrecy, and the staggering payouts — would generate the sort of outrage that surrounds similar cases involving the Catholic Church. You’d think that Bonta, the state’s top cop, would call for investigations, prosecutions, and — imagine this — the decoupling of teachers’ unions from school governance. You’d think that local school-board trustees, fearing multimillion-dollar settlements with sex-abuse victims, would unanimously adopt the parent-notification policy. But in the upside-down Golden State, many still think that only government can save us from the terrors lurking inside our own families.