Bill to curb sex abuse settlements stalls, likely to return next year
Jonathan Wright, 39, holds up the T-shirt he was given when he first went to MacLaren Children’s Center in El Monte as an 8-year-old during a news conference in Los Angeles on June 9, 2022. He said he was sexually abused by a physician there. A Los Angeles County-run shelter meant to be a safe space for children as they awaited placement in foster homes was for decades a den for sexual predators among the staff — and some residents — who preyed on children as young as 5, according to a lawsuit filed by dozens of former residents in 2022.
Credit: Christopher Weber/AP Photo
California school leaders will have to wait until next year — if then — to see any relief from a surge of sexual abuse lawsuits that are costing them fat settlements and rising legal bills and insurance costs.
Lawmakers and others said they are frustrated by the collapse of legislation aimed at relieving a problem vexing school districts, cities and counties across the state. Meanwhile, advocates for victims said the rights of those abused as children by public employees to seek justice must come before fiscal concerns.
Senate Bill 577 by Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, would have reinstated a statute of limitations on sex abuse claims involving public agencies that lawmakers repealed in 2020. The passage of Assembly Bill 218 has resulted in lawsuits alleging abuse dating back to as far as 1965, public records show.
The bill stalled at a time when research shows the costs of such suits are rising sharply. The state Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, known as FCMAT, which helps school districts with financial issues, estimated in January that the impact on schools could be $2 billion to $3 billion or higher.
A recent report by the California Association of Joint Powers Authorities, which includes authorities formed by school districts to pool insurance costs, estimates that the costs could soar far higher because an unknown number of cases with multiple clients against districts are expected to be settled in the years ahead.
School districts’ pooled insurance costs are also rising as districts scramble for additional protections. A survey of agencies, including schools, seeking additional insurance shows such costs have risen 216% between 2020 and fiscal year 2024-25.
The fiscal effect on schools is real, Laird said in an interview. “It’s not fair to the students or the teachers now to absorb major cuts in education in classrooms from actions that were way before them that they had nothing to do with.”
But trying to balance the interests of public agencies swamped with claims while also allowing victims a path to justice for suffering life-altering sexual attacks proved fruitless as Laird’s support in the Assembly collapsed. He pulled the bill back from a vote to enable him to push it again next year.
“This is a really hard needle to thread,” he said. “I was talking to victim groups. I was talking to local governments. I was talking to attorneys.”
Securing relief for local agencies ran headlong into protecting the rights of victims to bring additional lawsuits, Laird said. “They just blew up the bill. They didn’t recognize how delicately this was balanced.”
One of the biggest fights involved claims not against school districts but against Los Angeles County, which earlier this year agreed to a $4 billion settlement with roughly 7,000 victims of abuse in its juvenile facilities, believed to be the largest such settlement in history, dwarfing sexual abuse settlements with the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America.
Many involved children who were housed at the MacLaren Children’s Center in El Monte, a notorious foster care facility that closed in 2003, which multiple news outlets have described as “a hellhole.”
SB 577 would have cut off lawsuits involving MacLaren after Jan. 1. But, Assemblymember Dawn Addis, D-Morro-Bay, said she and others balked at stopping future MacLaren abuse claims.
“The right to seek justice is one of the only things that survivors have in many cases,” she said, noting that more than half of abuse survivors don’t come forward until their 50s.
Cutting off MacLaren lawsuits means that victims now as young as 27 would have lost the ability to sue. “These are people who have survived, in many cases, the worst of crimes, child sex, molestation, rape of a child,” Addis said. She and others “just couldn’t stomach voting for something that’s going to hurt people like that.”
Without naming individual lawmakers, his fellow Democrats, Laird blamed “Assembly leadership” for stopping the bill.
An Irvine law firm, Manly, Stewart & Finaldi, one of the country’s top firms representing sexual abuse victims, ran two online ads about the bill earlier this month, targeting Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, D-Hollister.
The firm was not part of Los Angeles County’s $4 billion settlement but has 150 other cases pending against the county, according to news reports. It is also suing the Los Angeles Unified School District, which in June approved $500 million in judgment-obligation bonds to fund an undisclosed number of settlements. The bonds and interest will be repaid from the district’s general fund, meaning the money will be drawn from funds originally meant for classroom instruction.
One of the ads shows a photo of the speaker next to the words “stop the predator protection law.” In the other, a young woman says a Los Angeles teacher molested her when “I was eight years old. Tell speaker Rivas that predators should be punished, not protected.”
Rivas’ spokesman, Nick Miller, declined to discuss the ads. In a statement, Miller said Rivas “aims to make progress (on the bill) next year.”
The law firm’s managing partner, John Manly, said in an interview that he published the ad to make sure that the bill, in the hectic final days of the session, didn’t slip through. The message to lawmakers was, “This is radioactive, and if you insist on pursuing this, you’re going to pay a political price.”
Faith Borges, a lobbyist for the California Association of Joint Powers Authorities, which supported SB 577, told EdSource the ads “were targeted to kill the bill.” She said they were intended to tell supporters, “If you are willing to have this conversation, you will be portrayed as somebody who is among the worst of society.”
Dorothy Johnson, a legislative advocate for the Association of California School Administrators, said that the end-of-the-session “chaos” and loud opposition from the survivor group killed the bill’s momentum. The association had lobbied for tightening districts’ liability exposure and for establishing standards of evidence for decades-old cases.
The impact of the claims on school districts across the state is real and costly, public records show.
The settlements
The San Francisco Unified School District paid two former students $4.5 million in 2023 to settle allegations documented in court filings that a high school athletic director, Lawrence Young-Yet Chan, began sexually assaulting them in 2012. The San Francisco Standard reported Chan resigned from the district in 2017.
In Orange County, the Irvine Unified School District settled with a former student for $4.7 million for sexual abuse he claimed in court that he suffered from a sixth grade teacher starting in 1978. The teacher, Louis Byron Cann, was later convicted of sex crimes and sentenced to eight years in state prison, records show.
The Union School District in San Jose took an abuse lawsuit by two former students to a jury trial in 2022. A Santa Clara County jury awarded the victims $102 million for abuses suffered when they were in middle school at the hands of a music teacher, who is now in state prison.
Still, getting details on settled cases can be difficult, even for the California School Boards Association, its spokesman said.
“We can’t get a lot of information from a lot of districts because their lawyers tell them it’s not advisable to speak on this,” said spokesman Troy Flint. “And, obviously, districts are wary of sharing information that could be used to paint them as a district where sexual abuse is an issue.”
There’s no official count of abuse suits that school districts across the state are facing or have settled, or how much those settlements total. The education budget bill passed earlier in the legislative session requires districts to report settlements to the state Department of Education starting next year.
But there is no effort to total the settlements already approved. FCMAT’s chief executive officer, Michael H. Fine, said there is no workable way to track the details of past settled cases. “It’s almost impossible,” Fine said.
But Fine pointed to one legislative achievement that could eventually provide relief by stopping sexual abuse in schools before it starts. SB 848 by Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, D-Alhambra, is awaiting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature. It incorporated recommendations by FCMAT to combat abuse long before it results in a broken life and costly litigation.
It would require a statewide database of egregious school employee misconduct, deeper background checks of job applicants, and training for teachers, administrators and students on how to recognize signs of grooming students for potential abuse. It would also require stricter background checks for non-educational employees, such as custodians, coaches and bus drivers.
“There are some costs to it, and so that doesn’t make the bill a slam dunk for the governor,” Fine said. They include building a database and possible investigations of employees. Prevention measures, he said, “are a priority.”
Editor-at-Large John Fensterwald and data journalist Daniel J. Willis contributed to this story.
This story was updated Dec. 1, 2025, with the correct bill number by Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, D-Alhambra. The bill is SB 848.
