Lawsuit alleges Simi teacher abused kids and district covered it up

A former Simi Valley special education teacher allegedly abused four of her students, and school district officials covered it up, according to a lawsuit filed by the kids’ parents. 

The civil complaint was filed in May in Ventura County Superior Court by the mothers of the students. The mothers are identified by name and the students are identified by their initials. They were in the teacher’s kindergarten class and the alleged abuse occurred between 2015 and 2018. 

The complaint alleges the children’s special education teacher at Garden Grove Elementary School abused them and that several school and Simi Valley Unified School District officials “covered up” the known abuse, the complaint states. 

The teacher and the district are named as defendants in the complaint. The teacher could not be reached for comment and the district declined to comment on the ongoing litigation. 

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“One of the reasons we can’t comment on things that are active is it hits on employee privacy laws and student privacy laws. Our hands are almost always tied,” said Jake Finch, a district spokeswoman. 

However, Finch said that the “teacher in question” is no longer a district employee.

Each child was a student in the teacher’s moderate/severe special day class. 

The complaint lists about two dozen ways the teacher allegedly abused the kindergarten students who had Down syndrome, epilepsy, cerebral palsy and other intellectual disabilities and developmental delays. These disabilities make it so the children have limited verbal and communication skills, the complaint states. 

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The list of alleged abusive acts includes grabbing students and screaming in their face, dragging them across the floor, picking them up and dropping them, slapping them, touching their butts, leaving them in soiled diapers and refusing to feed students who require assistance. 

The children’s attorney, Ron Bamieh, said the teacher’s behavior alleged in the complaint had been reported to the school and the district. He contends there are at least 10 years worth of complaints about the educator that school district officials knew about, but they kept it quiet out of loyalty to her.

The teacher complaints allegedly also stem from conduct at Sycamore Elementary School, the complaint states. 

“It’s just repulsive. The whole behavior of everybody in that district is repulsive,” Bamieh said. 

School and district officials allegedly threatened and intimidated school staff from reporting the abuse and “deliberately failed to inform parents” of the alleged abuse, the complaint states. 

“The district’s deliberate indifference toward the plaintiffs’ abuse and known cover up of the abuse is egregious, appalling and unlawful,” the complaint states.  

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The complaint states that the alleged misconduct was reported by a school employee to Simi Valley police and Ventura County Children and Family Services. 

Jennie Pittman, a spokeswoman for the county agency, said laws prevent her from confirming or disclosing any information about the alleged report. Simi Valley Police Department Cmdr. Steve Shorts said his agency investigated two reports involving the teacher and students, but officers found there was no criminal violation. 

Bamieh doesn’t buy that, and doubts the thoroughness of the police investigations because of the evidence his firm claims to have found. 

‘My son is limited verbally, but his behavior speaks volumes’ 

This kind of behavior is a mother’s worst nightmare, said Denise Bell, one of the students’ parents. 

“As a parent of a child with special needs, we have to blindly trust. We don’t get the choice of saying to our kids, ‘Tell me if something is happening to you,’” Bell said. 

Their disabilities limit their ways to communicate, she said. Her greatest fear was that something was going to happen. And based on what she has been told and what her defense team has discovered, she believes and alleges that something did. 

“My son is limited verbally, but his behavior speaks volumes,” Bell said. 

Her son loved to go to school and was very social and had friends. Within a few months of being in the teacher’s class, he came to hate school, Bell said. He would say he was sick and hide when it was time to go to school, she said. 

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“He didn’t want to go to school, and that was so unlike him,” Bell said. 

He’d also come home with bruises and scratches. Anytime a student gets hurt, the school is supposed to send home a nurse’s note, but she wasn’t getting those, Bell said. She asked the school about her son’s injuries and the staff would say the marks were made by another student, Bell said. 

Then there were the night terrors when her son would scream in his sleep, Bell said. Whenever the mother and son were out in the community, such as youth baseball games, the boy would become afraid whenever the teacher was around, Bell said. 

It all came to a head when Bell refused to let her son back in that classroom, resulting in a meeting with the teacher and school principal.

At the Aug. 17, 2018, meeting, the complaint states, the teacher admitted to abusing Bell’s  son — a confession Bell said she never saw coming. The educator was removed from the classroom three days later, according to the complaint. 

The person acting as Garden Grove’s principal in the meeting is no longer principal of the school, but remains a district employee, Finch said. 

After this revelation, Bell sought to speak with the district’s superintendent and the district official who oversees special education services. She said she sat outside their office but never got a meeting, she said. 

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Finch, the district spokeswoman, said she could not comment on these claims because they are related to the ongoing litigation. 

“I had no choice but to seek legal counsel,” Bell said. 

Her son is traumatized and in therapy now, Bell said. He’s doing better, but he lost valuable time in early education, she said. It was only recently that he learned his colors, Bell said. 

The lawsuit is seeking to recoup those lost educational opportunities for the students as well as monetary damages for emotional distress. 

Bell wants change. She said she wants the people involved in the alleged cover-up to be removed and for children to be safe from alleged abusers. 

“It needs to stop, and people need to know,” Bell said. 

What happened when police got involved?

Once the teacher was no longer in the classroom, parents started to talk to each other about the behavior they saw their child exhibiting, Bamieh said. Four families identified the similarities and are now party to the lawsuit, Bamieh said. Six other victims have since been identified and their families are figuring out how they want to proceed, he said. 

It’s unclear whether any parents reported the alleged abuse and misconduct directly to police. 

The complaint mentions a school staff member reporting a November 2015 incident of the teacher’s alleged abuse of a student. It was allegedly reported to Ventura County Children and Family Services. According to the complaint, the staff member saw the teacher dragging a student crying on the floor, pushing her and dropping her to the ground and yelling at her. 

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Pittman, the spokeswoman for the county agency, would not confirm whether such a report was made. Generally speaking, she said, the county agency is involved in matters of abuse or negligence against a child by a parent or guardian. Incidents involving teachers would be referred back to law enforcement for investigation. 

Shorts, the Simi Valley police commander, said the agency received a “mandated reporter” form from Children and Family Services in November 2015. 

Mandated reporters are people in certain positions of trust who are legally required to report incidents of child abuse, elder abuse or any other kind of abuse. Mandated reporters are people like police officers, teachers and medical personnel, Shorts said. 

A police investigative report of the November 2015 incident is “pretty close” to the summary of events in the complaint, Shorts said. The investigating officer found the abuse report “unfounded,” meaning the fact pattern did not indicate this was an assault or abusive behavior, Shorts said. 

There was another incident in February 2016 in which officers investigated allegations of mistreatment against a student by the same teacher, Shorts said. Authorities didn’t determine there was any criminal liability, however, Shorts said. 

“Both of those cases indicate that the school district was going to do their own internal processing or follow-up on it, which they don’t share that with us,” Shorts said. 

That’s because of employee and student privacy rights, he said. 

The district investigates complaints that come in and follows all procedures in the uniform complaint procedures linked on the district’s website. These procedures ensure the district is complying with state and federal law, Finch said. 

“Each one is handled on a case-by-case basis, so there’s no set process, but it gets jumped on right away,” Finch said. 

Megan Diskin is a courts and breaking news reporter with The Star. Reach her at megan.diskin@vcstar.com or 805-437-0258.