The Los Angeles Unified School District board has agreed to pay $24 million to three former students to settle claims that they were sexually abused by their Langdon Avenue Elementary School teacher on multiple occasions in his classroom during school hours in 2006 and 2007.
The settlement resolves a lawsuit that accused school officials of ignoring complaints about inappropriate behavior by teacher David Ostovich at another LAUSD elementary school years before he allegedly abused the Langdon girls, who were 8 and 9 at the time.
Ostovich could not be reached for comment but denied wrongdoing in court filings.
When Ostovich worked at Germain Elementary School, he was the subject of dozens of complaints from administrators, teachers, parents and students about his inappropriate behavior with girls, the lawsuit alleges.
Ostovich left that school and took a job at Langdon in North Hills, a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. LAUSD administrators never shared those prior complaints with Langdon administrators, court records show.
At Langdon Elementary School, the teacher was reprimanded several times but was allowed to continue teaching fourth grade and then first grade. In 2006-2007, according to the lawsuit, he abused two of the plaintiffs. The following year, he took over a first-grade class, where he abused the third plaintiff, according to the lawsuit. All three girls, who were identified by Jane Doe pseudonyms in the lawsuit, are now adults in their 20s and 30s.
David Ring, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said it was a clear example of “passing the buck,” where a teacher is allowed to quietly move to another school despite repeated complaints about inappropriate behavior with students.
“This is an outrageous case that highlights LAUSD’s systematic failure to protect children from known child molesters,” Ring said in an interview. “The abuse these three women suffered forever altered their lives. It could have been completely prevented if LAUSD had done its job.”
Ring said there were more than 20 complaints about the teacher's behavior before he was fired.
Ostovich had started going to Germain as a volunteer because two of his daughters were attending the school. He later became a special education assistant and in 2003 there were complaints that he had one girl on his lap and his hand in another girl's back pocket.
School administrators warned him about his behavior in 2004, prompted by reports that he rubbed, touched and hugged girls. Despite the reprimand, he received the principal's award and earned his teaching credential in 2004-2005, according to court documents in the litigation.
A young teacher who observed his continued inappropriate behavior prevented him from being hired at the school, but because the principal never documented it in writing, Ostovich landed a job at Langdon, according to court documents in the case.
In 2006 and 2007, when he was in his 40s and teaching fourth-graders, Ostovich began harassing and eventually sexually abusing the girls, according to the lawsuit. He frequently asked the girls to stay with him during recess and lunch behind closed doors in his classroom, according to the lawsuit, and would inappropriately touch, rub and hug them, in addition to sexually abusing them.
In a statement, one of the girls claimed the man made her stay in his classroom during lunch and sexually abused her. Even during class, he came to her desk and made her sit on his lap and abused her in full view of her classmates in ways they knew she was being abused, she said in court documents.
The school moved him to teach first grade. In July 2007, Langdon’s new principal, Leah Perroti, received a complaint from a parent alleging that Ostovich was “touching” girls, and he was given a written reprimand and a warning that a child abuse report would be filed if another allegation was made against him.
Despite the warning, other teachers saw girls on his lap, alone with him and receiving hugs, prompting Perroti to file a Report of Alleged Child Abuse against him, the suit says. In December 2007, he was expelled from the classroom. Perroti learned of the sexual abuse allegations the following year, and the Los Angeles police conducted an investigation, court records state.
Ostovich was criminally charged in February 2009 and later pleaded not guilty to two counts of fourth-degree assault against his two victims. The state teacher credentialing authority subsequently revoked his teaching credential.
All three women sued the district in 2021. During a deposition, LAUSD’s top administrator, who is now the superintendent of Manhattan Beach, acknowledged that school officials should have filed a report of suspected child abuse after each of the incidents at Germain.
