A school supervision and liability expert states in new court papers that the Los Angeles Unified School District failed to protect a woman who says she was sexually molested by a biology teacher at an East LA high school more than a decade ago.
The plaintiff in the Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit was 27 years old when she brought her case in July 2024 and is identified only as Jane Doe. Her allegations include sexual abuse of a minor, intentional infliction of emotional distress, sexual assault and battery and negligent hiring, supervision and retention of an unfit employee. The LAUSD has moved to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the former student at the Social Justice Leadership Academy at Esteban Torres High School, citing a lack of witnesses to her allegations.
But in court papers filed by Doe’s attorneys on June 18 in opposition to the dismissal motion scheduled for hearing July 9 by Judge Daniel M. Crowley, Christopher Fore, an expert in educational policies, procedures and practices, states on behalf of the plaintiff that the school’s protection of Doe from teacher Salvador Cano fell short.
“The documents and testimony that I have reviewed in this case reflects that LAUSD and its employees did not meet the standard of care for school districts with respect to the professional duties of training, or following training, in spotting and responding to signs of grooming and inappropriate behavior by a teacher towards students,” Fore says.
He further says the “consistency of the testimony and the detail of the testimony were in my estimation highly credible that significant examples of Cano grooming female students, including plaintiff, were open and obvious and should have been observed by LAUSD employees during school hours.”
Fore says he believes LAUSD employees were presented with enough warning signs of inappropriate conduct that “clearly gave rise to an appearance of impropriety. Despite this, there is no evidence that any action was taken in response.”
The administration of the Social Justice Leadership Academy should have performed frequent and random informal observations of its teachers with their students and alternated the times that these observations would happen in order to discourage employees from acting inappropriately with students out of fear they may get caught, Fore says, adding that administrators also should watch for employees engaging in inappropriate behavior with students when they think no one is watching.
Cano, no longer a co-defendant in the suit with the district, knew Doe had special susceptibility to emotional distress due to her young age, according to the suit, which further states Doe “did not consent to this sexually offensive contact by Cano, nor did she welcome it.”
But in their dismissal motion, district lawyers say Doe has little evidence to support her contentions of abuses from December 2014 to June 2015, when the plaintiff was a senior at the Social Justice Leadership Academy.
“Plaintiff admits … that no one witnessed the sexual abuse, that she took steps to conceal the sexual relationship with Cano and that she did not report the abuse to school officials until March 2018, nearly three years after she graduated,” according to the LAUSD attorneys’ court papers.
There is also no evidence that any LAUSD employee knew or had reason to know Cano had a dangerous propensity to commit such abuse, the district lawyers further state.
In her lawsuit, Doe says she enrolled as a junior at the high school in the 2013-14 school year and was assigned to be a teaching assistant in Cano’s biology class the next year. Cano, then 34, quickly became interested in Doe and started pursuing small talk with her to begin his grooming of the plaintiff, the suit alleges.
Cano later escalated his conduct with personal compliments of Doe and by rubbing her shoulders, according to the suit, which further alleges the teacher obtained Doe’s phone number by saying he wanted to text her from the coffee shop where he was buying a drink for her.
Starting with kissing the plaintiff, Cano began having inappropriate relations with Doe by December of her senior year, including in his classroom and in the classroom closet, the suit alleges.
Doe reported the alleged abuses in March 2018, according to the suit, which further states Cano pleaded no contest to felony charges and was sentenced to two years in prison.