‘Culture of intimidation’: BUSD pays $2.4 million to avoid student sex abuse jury trial

Barstow Unified School District settled for $2.4 million in a lawsuit filed by a former student who alleged the district’s high school allowed a longtime teacher to abuse her sexually.

In one of seven separate ongoing lawsuits, lawyers for the victim allege that BUSD’s high school was used as a “hunting ground” by the teacher to groom and sexually abuse students. Lawyers also allege the accused teacher — who died at 53 years old earlier this year — was shielded by “a culture of intimidation, silence (and) cover-ups” for nearly two decades.

The school district will avoid a potential jury verdict after the high-dollar Oct. 20 settlement, paid within the last few days, said Morgan Stewart, a partner at Irvine-based law firm Manly, Stewart & Finaldi.

In a statement to the Daily Press, BUSD said: “The settlement represents a mutual agreement” between itself and the alleged victim of its former teacher.

“(BUSD) is committed to its responsibility to educate students in a safe environment, and it takes this responsibility seriously,” the district stated. “(BUSD) will continue to pursue its mission to help students learn in an environment that is safe and conducive to learning.”

Yet, Barstow’s school system is far from finished facing repercussions from sweeping allegations of systemic sexual abuse being greenlit from the top, Stewart said. 

Stewart separately leads seven other suits that remain active against BUSD on behalf of 10 other alleged victims. Each says they were sexually abused as students in the K-12 system at some point in the last two decades. School workers also testified in court filings that they tried to report abuse they witnessed but were ignored by higher-ups.

“Barstow doesn’t pay this kind of money if they didn’t do something wrong,” Stewart told the Daily Press. “Staff members who have testified, their general perception is, ‘The administration doesn’t care, and we’re told to keep our mouths shut.’”

“The way I would fix it? Clear house,” he said. “As long as that same board continues to operate in the school district, they’re not gonna change.”

‘A hunter’

Most of the allegations in each case center around a former longtime teacher, Katherine O’Neill, who allegedly used Barstow High School “as her hunting ground” in order “to seek out vulnerable females grappling with their sexuality,” one ongoing complaint alleges.

“O’Neill was a hunter,” Stewart said. “She was hunting kids to abuse them. She was going out of her way to find kids, falsifying documents to get kids out of school.”

In the recently-settled lawsuit, Stewart represented a woman who remains anonymous but alleged that O’Neill sexually abused her during her time as a Barstow High School student sometime in the last 15 years.

The settlement last month was not the first time BUSD had to pay the victim. On June 20, court records show, a San Bernardino County Superior Court judge ordered the school district to pay $4,000 to the plaintiff because it “was not truthful” in the discovery process and “withheld” witness accounts from the court on improper grounds.

The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department arrested O’Neill in March 2019 based on the plaintiff's allegations in this case. They include that O’Neill had “an intimate relationship with the girl and had sent explicit text messages that contained obscene material,” Stewart said.

O’Neill was a social studies teacher employed by Barstow Unified School District for 17 years, district spokesman Devin Vargas said.

O’Neill posted a $100,000 bail and was released from custody a day after her arrest. Then, in January this year, the former Barstow teacher died. Her death has been attributed to COVID-19.

Other abuse lawsuits against BUSD

Speaking to the seven other suits he is leading against BUSD, Stewart said, “we will gladly take each one to trial if they don’t settle.”

Court filings reviewed by the Daily Press show allegations that reports on O’Neill’s suspected abuse were covered up by top officials, some of whom are now named as complicit in a systemic problem.

However, the allegations go beyond O’Neill. One plaintiff’s filing states that the district since 2004 “has had no less than 14 alleged sexual perpetrators that have existed and (are) alleged to have abused students within the BUSD school district.”

“In sworn testimony, BUSD employees and former employees have testified to a culture of intimidation, silence, cover-ups and looking the other way while minors in BUSD are sexually abused by BUSD employees,” according to one anonymous plaintiff’s complaint that remains active.

“These (employees) were threatened, asked to recant, and/or informed to sweep reports under the rug,” continued the complaint, which named Scott Godfrey --  Barstow High School's assistant principal at the time, who has since become a BUSD assistant superintendent -- as a specific defendant alongside O’Neill and the school district itself.

Stewart has helped recover more than $88.4 million in three decades representing thousands of sexual-abuse victims, according to his firm’s website, including cases against the Catholic Church and Los Angeles Unified School District.

But in “terms of reporting (of alleged abuse) going on that isn’t being addressed,” he said, “I’ve never seen it on a scale like we see in Barstow.”

“It’s happening a lot in Barstow, and nobody is correcting it,” he said. “Maybe I’m a glossy-eyed crusader, but it pisses me off that this is happening, and nobody’s stopping it.”

Charlie McGee covers the city of Barstow and its surrounding communities for the Daily Press. He is also a Report for America corps member with the GroundTruth Project, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to supporting the next generation of journalists in the U.S. and around the world. McGee may be reached at 760-955-5341 or cmcgee@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @bycharliemcgee.