California school district faces sex abuse lawsuit. Did L.A.’s $4-billion payout open floodgates?

Five California women sued a Fresno County school system Wednesday, alleging officials brushed aside claims they were being sexually assaulted by a second-grade teacher who was later convicted of similar abuse.

The case against the Clovis Unified School District comes amid a tidal wave of sexual abuse litigation that has left lawmakers scrambling to stop misconduct — and schools struggling to pay settlements owed to victims suing over crimes that stretch back decades.

The latest case dates back to the late 1990s and early 2000s. Plaintiff Samantha Mu?oz, now a 28-year-old mother of two, is among those alleging she was abused by then-Fancher Creek Elementary School teacher Neng Yang.

Mu?oz claims in the lawsuit that Yang began molesting her in 2004, when she was his 7-year-old student. By that time, the lawsuit says, girls had been complaining to Clovis Unified School District officials about Yang for years. The teacher was eventually arrested for producing child pornography in 2012, and has spent the past decade in federal prison in San Pedro, where he is serving a 38-year term for sexual exploitation of a minor.

“Clovis Unified was protecting this predator,” said Mu?oz. “They continued to have him teaching at that school knowing he was [assaulting students].”

The Times does not typically identify victims of sexual assault, but Mu?oz and two of her four co-plaintiffs said they wanted to speak out publicly about what happened.

Kelly Avants, a spokeswoman for Clovis Unified, said the district had not yet received notice of the lawsuit.

“We have not been served with the suit yet, but will review it when we are served and respond accordingly,” Avants said.

The public defender’s office that represented Yang in his criminal case referred questions to federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of California. A spokesperson for that office said they could offer no comment.

“When a teacher saw him showing me child pornography on his phone, school officials interrogated me and then encouraged me to say nothing,” Mu?oz said. “I was left in his classroom and he kept abusing me.”

The Fresno case follows a landmark $4-billion settlement this spring over sexual abuse in L.A. County’s juvenile facilities, group and foster homes — believed to be the largest in U.S. history.

On Tuesday, the state’s largest school district, Los Angeles Unified, announced it would sell up to $500 million in bonds to help cover its anticipated sexual abuse liability.

“There’s tremendous cost pressures on school districts,” said Michael Fine, head of California’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, which published a report in January estimating state education agencies could be liable for $2 billion to $3 billion for past sexual misconduct. “No matter what, the money’s coming out of their current resources.”

The payouts stem from a series of recent changes to California’s statute of limitations for child sexual assault. Beginning with Assembly Bill 218 in 2019, the state opened a brief window for allegations going back as far as 1940. The law permanently extended the deadline for victims to file child sex abuse claims until age 40, or within five years of realizing a new illness or “psychological injury” as a result of abuse.

“There are definitely school districts out there that feel the state changed the law so the state should pay,” Fine said.

Some in the debate argue only abusers — not cash-strapped schools — should be liable for misconduct.

For most California school districts, the money is likely to come from a public entity risk pool, a collective pot that multiple agencies pay into to cover liabilities such as health insurance and workers’ compensation.

Many pools are assessing their members “retroactive premiums” in an attempt to cover sex abuse suits touched off by the change in the law, Fine said. That means even schools that haven’t been sued face higher operating costs.

“There’s impacts to the classroom whether there’s a claim or not, because they’ve got to pay the retroactive premiums somehow,” he said. “If they were in the pool, they’re on the hook.”

In its report, the agency recommended alternative ways the state and school districts might cover liabilities stemming from the law — including a modified form of receivership for agencies that can’t pay, and a new state victim’s compensation fund — as well as concrete steps to stem abuse.

The latter have been enthusiastically adopted by California lawmakers, including state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Alhambra). But other suggestions have been ignored, Fine said.

“There isn’t a bill out there that carries the rest of our recommendations,” he said.

After months spent trying to understand the scale and the magnitude of the liability California institutions are facing, stories like those in the Clovis Unified suit haunt him, Fine said.

“It’s emotionally overwhelming,” he said.

Plaintiffs in the Clovis case described nearly identical abuse stretching back to 1998, when Yang was still a student teacher.

According to Wednesday’s complaint, then-second-grader Tiffany Thrailkill told the Fancher Creek principal, vice principal and school counselor that Yang had groped her and forced her to perform oral sex.

“In response, [officials] took the position that Tiffany was lying and referred her to psychological treatment,” the suit alleged.

Despite laws dating back to the 1980s that require abuse to be reported, school officials kept the allegations quiet and never investigated Yang, the suit said.

“Instead of reporting Yang and protecting their students, it appears school officials blamed the girls, looked the other way, and enabled Yang to abuse their students for over a decade,” said Jason Amala, the plaintiffs’ attorney.

Ultimately, Yang was caught by the Central California Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, a partnership between the Clovis Police Department and Homeland Security Investigations.

For Mu?oz, the teacher’s conviction was cold comfort. While she believes speaking out about her experience will inspire other victims to come forward, she now faces the agonizing decision of whether to send her nonverbal 4-year-old for early intervention services at the same elementary school where her suit alleges her nightmare began.

“Why would I want to go drop off my son at a place that’s nothing but bad memories?” the mother said. “It’s like signing my life away to the devil again.”

“I just need them to be accountable for who they protected,” Mu?oz said.