The Los Angeles Unified School District will pay $3.55 million to two more people who allege they were abused as students by former teacher Mark Berndt, attorneys said Monday.
One of the former students of Miramonte Elementary School, where Berndt taught for decades, will receive $1.85 million and the other $1.7 million under the terms of a settlement announced by attorney Morgan Stewart.
Their lawsuits alleged that Berndt harassed, abused and sexually assaulted them on multiple occasions between approximately 2004 and 2008.
LAUSD did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. The settlements did not include any admission of wrongdoing by the district.
Berndt, a former third-grade teacher, was arrested in 2012 and pleaded no contest to 23 counts of lewd conduct the following year. The allegations against him included that he fed his semen to children in what he called a “tasting game.”
He was sentenced to 25 years in prison and remains behind bars.
Berndt taught at Miramonte from 1979 to 2011, when investigators began probing his conduct based on photographs given to police, some of which showed schoolchildren blindfolded and with duct tape over their mouths, authorities said.
The lawsuits that were settled allege that Miramonte administrators and LAUSD officials ignored multiple complaints from parents, students and teachers about Berndt's sexual misconduct with children dating back to the early 1980s.
In 1983, a parent complained that Berndt, then 32, had dropped his pants during a student field trip to a museum.
In 2014, LAUSD agreed to pay about $139 million (believed to be the largest payment ever made by a school system in a child abuse case at the time) to resolve legal claims by 69 Miramonte parents and 81 students who accused Berndt for lewd acts. The district also paid out about $30 million in claims to the families of 65 Miramonte students.
“This settlement represents another chapter in a horrendous scandal,” Stewart said. “Ten years after the largest sexual abuse settlement against a public school district, it is a continuing reminder of the harm that results when school officials choose to ignore red flags and complaints from students and parents about a serial sexual predator.”
In the wake of the Miramonte scandal, then-Supt. John Deasy removed more than 200 teachers from his classrooms across the district. All Miramonte staff were temporarily replaced in the second half of the school year and all employees were required to review abuse reporting policies.
