Time for a Reckoning at San Diego Unified

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Just three weeks after the United States Department of Education slammed San Diego Unified School District for its handling of sexual harassment complaints, its superintendent has been dismissed after a report substantiated allegations of sexual harassment against him.

We still don’t know exactly what employees alleged Superintendent Lamont Jackson did to them or what the report about the investigation they provoked found, but he’s now no longer superintendent because of it.

That means he no longer must deal with any remaining fallout of the Office for Civil Rights’ review of 253 complaints of sexual harassment and assault over just three years at the school district. In that review, the feds found that the district’s response to sexual harassment and assault claims was characterized by repeated failures.

“These failures led to serial perpetration of harassment with insufficient district response, leaving district students vulnerable to the sex discrimination in school,” officials wrote.

Jackson was a district leader during the years the feds reviewed but he was not superintendent. That was Cindy Marten, his predecessor, who is now, coincidentally, the deputy secretary of the Department of Education.

We’ve spent years investigating and chronicling complaints about educators and school leaders across the region. Yet no agency has gotten more scrutiny than San Diego Unified. Just this week, we settled yet another lawsuit with the district after district officials, once again, failed to turn over all relevant documents about harassment allegations against an educator the district quietly allowed to retire despite years of complaints.

The district’s police chief retired amid complaints from a dozen officers.

In response to the federal agency’s investigation, district spokesperson Maureen Magee said the district has improved since 2020, the last year the feds reviewed.

“The findings released by OCR are related to a review period that spanned the school years from 2017-18 to 2019-20, which do not reflect the District’s current policies and practices,” Magee wrote. 

But Jackson became interim superintendent in 2021 and the investigation into him concluded just this week. What policies and practices was he following?

In March, police arrested a Hoover High associate principal, Charles De Freitas on allegations that he possessed child pornography, sent pornography to a minor and contacted a minor with “intent to commit a sexual offense.”

It took our Jakob McWhinney to reveal in June that nearly two years before his arrest, Jackson had received a complaint from a parent that De Freitas had sexually harassed their child.

Jackson took action: He promoted De Freitas.

Something is dreadfully, horrifically wrong at the District and its Board of Education faces a moment of reckoning. The trustees have let a cancer metastasize throughout the district – a culture that tolerated abusive and violent people.

I’m not sure how they restore trust, but saying this is all old news is not going to do it.

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