Posted on 02/10/2012 5:12:06 PM PST by Libloather
Report: Teacher at heart of LA school district molest scandal was paid $40,000 to resign
Article by: Associated Press Updated: February 10, 2012 - 4:47 PM
LOS ANGELES - The former third-grade teacher who has been charged with committing lewd acts on students was paid $40,000 to drop an appeal of his firing, a newspaper reported Friday.
The Los Angeles Unified School District settled with Mark Berndt because it couldn't defend his February 2011 firing, district general counsel David Holmquist told the Los Angeles Times.
Berndt was removed from the classroom in January 2011 and dismissed as the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department was investigating him. He appealed but resigned in June after the district agreed to pay him four months of back salary and reimburse his health benefit costs.
"We were told we could not do any investigation" to avoid interfering with the criminal probe, Holmquist said. "We didn't have any evidence and we couldn't put on any witnesses. We didn't have anything to successfully defend a challenge."
The 61-year-old recently was charged with 23 counts of lewd acts upon children, ages 6 to 10, accused of feeding his semen to some students during "tasting games" in his classroom from 2005 to 2010.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
John & Ken of KFI were talking about this today.
There was a deadline for the school district to either allow Berndt to go before a panel of 3-teachers who would’ve determined whether or not he could go back to the classroom or just make the whole thing go away and pay him off.
The LAUSD decided to pay him off because they figured that the 3-panel appeals board would just return him back to the classroom.
Everybody knew about the photographs and “cloudy substance” that was on the cookies, but the Sherriff’s Dept. hadn’t confirmed the DNA tests that it was his semen.
What’s outrageous is that the LAUSD allows these crazy rules that permit a panel of 3 other teachers to determine whether or not Berndt is fit to return to the classroom.
That’s more money than some honest people make in a year and all he had to do was betray his trust, all at taxpayer expense.
Just an endless line of government insanity...
Get your kids out of public government schools.
It was probably the cheapest alternative.
The district would have saved a lot of money simply sending me a plane ticket and a baseball bat.
If he had fed my kid his semen, I would have fed him his balls.
Same here, V.
The cops would still be looking for the body.
One of the least desirable school districts in America and for good reason.
He was/is 61. Is he eligible to retire? if so is there any way of taking that away from him? Well short of shooting him. although shooting him would be satisfying.
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