Will SA lawmakers break promises to child abuse victims?

By John Manley, especially for CalMatters

This comment was originally posted by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

The California Legislature is considering revising a state law that would give more victims of child sexual abuse the ability to sue public schools. This column is against law reform. This accompanying column backs it up.

Guest Comment written by

School district lobbyists, public employee unions and insurance interests are once again pressuring California lawmakers to downplay Assembly Bill 218, a measure passed unanimously by lawmakers in 2019. close a gaping loophole in the statute of limitations which allow schools to avoid civil liability for allowing or concealing the sexual abuse of children by teachers and staff.

AB 218 passed with increasing awareness of the psychological, cultural and economic barriers victims face, discouraging them from disclosing their abuse – often over many years – as well as disclosing cases of mass abuse that still occur. Case in point: the horrific incident at Miramonte Elementary School, in which Los Angeles Unified School District teacher Mark Berndt posed and photographed dozens of third-graders eating cookies filled with his semen, a jar of which he kept on his desk. He is serving a 25-year prison sentence.

Last year, intense lobbying by anti-AB 218 forces resulted in two bills failing to reach a vote after a huge backlash from survivors and victims’ advocates.

Senate Bill 577, authored by Sen. John Laird (D-Santa Cruz), proposed some common sense changes to existing lawbut the account was hijacked. School districts, counties and Joint Powers Authority lobbyists pushed for amendments to drastically reduce survivors’ access to benefits.

SB 832, authored by teacher union standard-bearer Sen. Ben Allen, would have gutted survivors’ rights.

These same powerful forces are once again poised to introduce draconian “reforms” related to AB 218 during the 2026 session that would make it difficult, if not impossible, for survivors to receive full compensation.

What’s most troubling is the deliberately opaque manner in which the bills related to AB 218 are being debated. House Speaker Robert Rivas has reportedly tasked a group of lawmakers with “exploring solutions that strike the right balance” of responsibility for child sexual abuse. This happens behind closed doors.

Not surprisingly, proponents of anti-survivor measures want to remain anonymous. During the 2025 session, lawmakers complained when victim advocates called them “capable of child sexual abuse.”

It is an apt moniker for politicians who ignore the enormity of the child sexual abuse crisis, which is believed to affect more than 10% of K-12 students in public schools.

The Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom knew that compensating the victims would not be cheap, but they rightly concluded that it was a necessary and moral step to take responsibility for the devastation of thousands of lives and deter future school violence.

Five years later, school and insurance lobbyists are misrepresenting the fiscal impact of AB 218 while blaming child sexual abuse survivors.

The majority of school districts are fiscally sound. The state’s school finance watchdog, the California Financial Crisis and Management Support Team, recently found that most districts’ financial positions “remain strong.” only four districts face significant fiscal problems — decrease compared to previous years.

The biggest driver of emerging school funding gaps isn’t sexual assault claims, but steady decline in K-12 enrollmenton which state funding of schools is based.

School districts and their insurance allies claim to support justice for survivors of abuse, but their well-paid lobbyists are doing everything they can to roll back victims’ rights. They refuse to take responsibility for decades of abuse during which thousands of children were abused in their care, and seek to curtail the rights of future victims.

At the same time, teachers unions are fighting common-sense reforms such as a state registry of school predators and increased criminal penalties for failure of “mandatory reporters” to inform law enforcement of suspected abuse.

In 2019, the Legislature and Governor Newsom promised survivors that they would have the same compensation rights as victims whose abuse occurred in personal settingssuch as in churches or Boy Scouts.

Breaking that promise now would not only do a grave injustice to past and present survivors, but would also greatly reduce the motivation of public schools to take more serious steps to protect children from predators.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.