How one Southern California school district kept decades of misconduct records secret

Edward Zuniga said he'd given me everything he could.

Six years ago, I'd requested every document the school district had going back to 2000 regarding claims of sexual harassment by teachers at Rosemead High School, one of the schools Zuniga oversees as superintendent of the El Monte Union High School District. A two-page reprimand of a longtime business teacher, Paul Arevalo, was all the district could turn over, Zuniga said.

But that wasn't true. Though I didn't know it at the time, the district was sitting on a large cache of teacher disciplinary records going back to at least the early 1990s, including several instances where teachers admitted their behavior to administrators.

Each time I requested these disciplinary records under the California Public Records Act, the district gave a new excuse for why it wouldn't release them. First, Zuniga cited the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which protects student privacy. Then, Zuniga and the district's lawyers said that all information from a teacher's personnel file was exempt from disclosure. And then they claimed that, in balancing an employee's expectation of privacy, "the public's interest is furthered by maintaining the confidentiality" of teachers accused of sexually abusing or harassing children.

The district's repeated resistance to releasing these records is just one example of the ways administrators have kept embarrassing allegations against teachers under wraps — potentially enabling abuse to fester.

The vast majority of sexual misconduct in schools is never reported to law enforcement, research shows, with an estimated 1% to 5% of cases ever referred to law enforcement or child-protective-services agencies. Often, district disciplinary records are the only documentation of a teacher's conduct, as publicly available state credentialing records generally don't disclose details of investigations. Without access to these documents, parents may remain in the dark about whom they are entrusting their children with at school.

At Rosemead High, my alma mater, a culture of secrecy dominated an environment where misconduct flourished. Altogether, I corroborated dozens of instances of sexual misconduct, involving 20 different educators at Rosemead, over the past four decades, ranging from lewd remarks about children's bodies to yearslong sexual relationships with students.

In many cases, students and employees told me they had reported suspected abuse to administrators, which should have created a paper trail. Yet the district either refused to turn over any related documents to Insider or claimed they didn't exist.

Read more about Rosemead High:

The predators' playground

He was my high school journalism teacher. Then I investigated his relationships with teenage girls.

How a Southern California high school shielded a beloved teacher who groomed students for sex

Pain, anger, and disgust: Inside Rosemead High's reckoning

In September 2022, Insider and I filed suit against the district. A day later, we received more than a hundred pages of teacher disciplinary records. Many of the records were ones that district officials previously said didn't exist or weren't releasable. The case regarding additional records that have been withheld is set to go to trial October 9.

"All too often, school districts choose not to disclose records to the public which would result in embarrassing administrators," said Felix Tinkov, an attorney representing me and Insider in the case, who has previously obtained disciplinary records from other California school districts. In many cases, Tinkov said, this resistance stems from districts failing to properly investigate credible allegations in the first place, or a "notion that if it isn't made public, the problem will just go away."

Zuniga declined repeated interview requests, saying that he "cannot comment on personnel or student matters."

The district's head of human resources, Robin Torres, recently sat for more than seven hours to face questions under oath about the district's recordkeeping. Her answers shed light on several district practices that risk protecting abusers. She said, for example, that basic public records, such as a notice of termination given to a teacher, could be withheld if they're part of a legal settlement and that the names of outside investigators hired by the district were exempt from disclosure.

Insider is arguing that neither is true under state law.

Other revelations from Torres' deposition included: 

Discarding records

The district threw away some investigative records after teachers left the district, Torres said — despite being required to keep certain records indefinitely. She said she was "not sure of the process of weeding those out," adding that the district was "looking at a process of being able to keep those electronically in the future, so as not to take up the space inside our file room." Torres also said she didn't know why some documents released by the district were incomplete.

Cursory investigations

In discussing investigations of several former teachers accused of sexual misconduct with students, Torres openly questioned whether her predecessors had done their jobs. "In my research, I would have expected to find additional information on these allegations," Torres said in describing the district's handling of sexual-harassment complaints against a former Rosemead health and safety teacher, Harlan Mayne. When asked about the district's investigation of the Rosemead choir director David Pitts' relationship with one of his former student accompanists, Torres said, bluntly, "It appears that there wasn't follow-through with this."

A failure to take misconduct seriously

Tinkov at one point asked Torres to read back a passage from a 2004 meeting in which an administrator directed Pitts to "stay out of our attendance area" if he wanted to continue dating his former student accompanist, who had recently graduated. "I would not expect to hear that from a management or leadership position," Torres said, shaking her head. "I would not expect that advice to be given."

Prioritizing 'employee rights' over transparency

A constant theme of the deposition was the concern that releasing investigative records to the public could "violate employee rights," and how to balance that against the safety of students. This tension was laid bare when Torres initially declined to even describe in generic terms the district's 2022 investigation of the chemistry teacher Justin Rosien. Pressed by Insider's attorney, Torres was instructed repeatedly by the district's lawyer not to answer questions "which would invite the district into a lawsuit for violation of his employee rights." Torres also said that notifying "anybody" of past discipline or investigation of a teacher would violate district policy.

The district's employee contract, negotiated by the local teachers union, doesn't limit the disclosure of records related to serious allegations of misconduct or behavior deemed "unprofessional." Anne Bazile, president of the El Monte Union Educators Association, said the union "has no direct involvement in any separation agreements." There was no sign they were involved in the nearly two dozen settlement and separation agreements the district released to Insider going back to 2010.

In several cases, district officials may have gone beyond shielding disciplinary records from the general public. In at least three instances, the district did not share misconduct allegations against Rosemead teachers with other schools that went on to hire them, a practice known as "passing the trash." The most recent example was Paul Arevalo.

On August 12, 2021, nearby Baldwin Park High School hired Arevalo as activities director with an annual salary of $112,913.

Before he transferred to the school, Arevalo was twice investigated by law enforcement and placed on administrative leave after students reported he'd sexually harassed them, though no criminal charges were filed. In both instances, Arevalo was allowed back in the classroom. (Arevalo declined to answer questions for this story; he previously told Insider that students and administrators had "fabricated accusations" against him.)

Arevalo didn't last long at Baldwin Park. On October 1, 2021, he resigned after less than two months.

In response to a public-records request, Baldwin Park officials said there were no misconduct allegations against Arevalo during his brief tenure and they hadn't received any of the disciplinary records concerning him that the El Monte district released to Insider.

I asked José Gallegos, a retired assistant principal who investigated Arevalo's sexual harassment in 2017 of a student at Arroyo High, another school in the El Monte district, what he made of that. He was stunned. 

"I can't believe they would let him transfer," Gallegos told me, saying that in his experience, school administrators typically respond to reference calls about teachers who've harassed or abused students by reciting only generic facts, such as dates of employment and subjects taught. The lack of additional information, Gallegos said, is "code — to not touch him with a 10-foot pole."

Baldwin Park's superintendent, Froilan Mendoza, declined to say what steps, if any, his office took to background Arevalo prior to hiring him.

In accepting Arevalo's resignation, Baldwin Park's head of human resources wished him "good luck in your next endeavor."

Correction: October 13, 2023 — An earlier version of this story said Insider's September 26 lawsuit prompted the release of district personnel records. The district had previously maintained those records would be produced by September 30.

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