When elementary school teacher Mark Berndt was arrested for sex crimes that included feeding his students his own semen, it was reported in this space that police suspected additional victims might turn up. It appears they should have been looking for additional villains. ABC News reports:
Prosecutors in Los Angeles have filed lewd-acts charges against a second teacher for allegedly fondling at least one student at the beleaguered Miramonte Elementary School in Los Angeles.
Martin Springer was charged Tuesday with committing three counts of committing lewd acts on one girl, according to the Los Angeles Times, which reported that a law enforcement officer said that a second girl recanted her accusation against the teacher.
This time, the Los Angeles Unified School District took quick and decisive action and fired Springer. They also took the additional (some will say disproportionate) step of transferring out the school's entire 128-person staff and transferring in teachers who had been laid off.
The district also reports by way of assurances to parents, who are understandably vexed, that they will check “fingerprints, backgrounds and personnel files of those individuals who are interested in coming back to temporarily teach … to ensure that they have no record of inappropriate behavior with children.” But does that suggest that such checks were not run initially, and if so why?
Another question that cries out for an answer is why suddenly accounts of pedophiliac teachers are coming out of the woodwork. The same day the story about Springer broke, the New York Post reported that a teacher’s aide at a school in Brooklyn was arrested by the FBI for the second time in two weeks for “offenses linked to illegally possessing films of underage children engaged in sexual acts.” Taleek Brooks was charged this time with making pornographic videos of students he was assaulting.
The warning signs of child predators are well-documented. Usually perverts are males who appear to be hard-working and family-oriented and—this may be key—among the most popular teachers in school. Are school administrators ignoring the signs because of the stigma associated with profiling? Or are they just uniformly bad at the jobs they are paid, often lucratively, to do?
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