Los Angeles’s School Nightmare: Another Sex-Abuse Scandal – The Daily Beast

The LA school district is probably the most risky place for sexual abuse in the country. What about keeping our kids safe from these teachers?

Fifty-seven-year-old Robert Pimentel, who taught at George De La Torre Jr. Elementary School in Los Angeles, has so far been charged with 15 counts of sexual abuse and lewd acts on a child. Prosecutors allege that he inappropriately touched students under and over their clothing from September 2011 until he left his job in March 2012. Before that time period as well, Pimentel had been the subject of parents’ complaints.

Just last year, in a scandal that set off an avalanche of lawsuits, another veteran teacher of the Los Angeles Unified School District, Mark Berndt, was accused of feeding his students spoonfuls of semen as part of a twisted ritual he called a “tasting game.” He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

“We are stunned here,” LAPD Detective Gus Villanueva tells The Daily Beast in the wake of the latest arrest. “We are dumbfounded. It just doesn’t stop.”

via Los Angeles’s School Nightmare: Another Sex-Abuse Scandal – The Daily Beast.