The Brief

A beloved teacher arrested for soliciting a minor. A coach convicted of sexual abuse. A school district hit with a multi-million-dollar jury verdict for failing to protect students.

The steady drumbeat of stories in recent years about educator sexual abuse in K-12 school districts across California shows the scope of misconduct is much wider than previously known. Yet the stories only hint at how common sexual harassment and grooming behavior has become in schools, with the best available data from the U.S. Education Department suggesting that 1 in 10 children is targeted for grooming at some point in their K-12 education.

A new bill, which is poised to pass the Legislature in the coming days, would give local and state officials more tools to identify and combat sexual abuse, and educate students to better identify the most common signs of grooming behavior. Senate Bill 848, or “Safe Learning Environments Act,” was authored by Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, a Democrat from Alhambra, in response to an investigative report in Business Insider, The Predators’ Playground. The 2023 story documented decades of sexual misconduct involving nearly two dozen different educators, ranging from lewd remarks about students' bodies during class to statutory rape, at a single California school, Rosemead High, which is in Pérez’s district.

Since the article was published, at least five civil lawsuits have been filed by former Rosemead students, while the state attorney general’s Bureau of Children’s Justice opened a rare investigation into the handling of educator sexual misconduct claims, which is ongoing.

“California lacks a comprehensive standardized approach to preventing abuse in K-12 schools,” Pérez told fellow lawmakers in urging their support. “Several high profile cases continue to highlight systemic failures and underscore an urgent need for stronger preventative measures to protect children.”

In an interview with CalMatters, Pérez said she could personally relate to the Rosemead story. When she was in high school, a male staffer some 20 years her senior took an interest in her, asking her questions about sex and boys her age. Then one day, when she returned to campus soon after graduating, he stopped her to ask if she’d turned 18 and if he could take her to dinner. That’s when, Pérez said, it dawned on her that he’d been grooming her for a sexual relationship.

State Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez addresses fellow lawmakers on the Senate floor at the state Capitol in Sacramento on Aug. 21, 2025.

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Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters

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“I didn't tell my parents or anything, but I talked about it with my friends,” she recalled. “And I remember talking about it, even at 17. That's when my friends started sharing their own stories.”

Law would mandate a database of employee misconduct

If it becomes law, Pérez’s bill would create a database of employee misconduct that district administrators must use to background prospective job candidates, require school district officials to report and track “egregious” instances of employee misconduct, mandate training for both educators and students on how to combat and recognize the signs of grooming, and require school districts to implement new written policies defining professional boundaries. It would also apply stricter prior employment check requirements for non-teachers, such as coaches, janitors and bus drivers, update the legal definition of “grooming” to include electronic communications and extend mandated reporter requirements to all employees.

Much of the policy changes in the bill are drawn from a January report produced by the state-funded Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team. The report studied the financial impact of a wave of lawsuits made possible through a landmark 2019 law that temporarily dropped the statute of limitations for victims of childhood sexual abuse to file civil claims against school districts for failing to protect them. Many of the resulting jury verdicts and settlements have been in the tens of millions of dollars, with some much higher.

As CalMatters previously reported, insurance premiums have skyrocketed for school districts, pushing some to the brink of financial insolvency. Estimates for the total value of claims statewide are around $3 billion, with many cases ongoing.

Pérez said this grim reality played a key role in her decision to draft the bill. “There are now dollars and cents being assigned to these cases,” she said. “It's really opened up this conversation about what can we do to better prevent this abuse from happening.”

Billie-Jo Grant, a professor at Cal Poly Pomona and a leading researcher in educator sexual misconduct, said the majority of grooming cases in schools go unreported. In many cases, a student is ashamed or feels complicit in the behavior, Grant said, while employees routinely fail to report suspicious behavior for fear of tarnishing a colleague’s reputation.

Because of a lack of federal data, Grant has tracked teacher arrests using published news clips, which show that more than 3,000 educators nationwide have been arrested since 2017 following allegations of sexual misconduct involving students. California’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing, meanwhile, has opened more than 1,300 investigations of teacher sexual misconduct over the same time period – a figure that does not include cases which are never referred to the state by school district officials.

Grant, who frequently serves as an expert witness in criminal sexual abuse cases, described Pérez’s bill as a great start toward creating more complete data on the frequency of abuse. She stressed, however, that relying on school officials to determine whether misconduct allegations are “substantiated” will lead to underreporting.

“I think what’s left out is all of the times where they simply don’t do an investigation, look at a complaint at face value, and ask the teacher if they’d resign. And that’s the end of the story,” Grant said. “The problem is there is no accountability for school administrators. Our system relies on them doing thorough investigations.”

Law would mandate a database of employee misconduct

A primary element of Pérez’s bill addresses “pass the trash,” a well-documented process in which teachers accused of sexual misconduct quietly resign, only to be hired elsewhere and re-offend. Research funded by the U.S. Department of Justice shows that an educator will on average pass through three different school districts before they are ultimately stopped. Many of these teachers are able to be rehired because of confidential separation agreements, in which school officials agree to not disclose allegations of misconduct to would-be employers in exchange for the educator’s resignation.

That’s what happened earlier this year with David Pitts, a former Rosemead High choir teacher who was placed on administrative leave at a nearby school after he was named in Business Insider’s reporting. A school district investigation of Pitts’ behavior nearly led to an administrative hearing at the state level — a final step that most cases never reach because the teacher has quietly resigned — before Pitts settled. Under the terms of his settlement agreement, Pitts will remain on the payroll until 2026. District officials agreed that if they receive any reference check from a potential employer, they would respond only by “providing Employee's dates of employment and assignments, and indicating that Employee retired from the District." Both Pitts and the district’s head of human resources declined to comment.

Pérez invited Cindy Lam, a Rosemead alum who said she was groomed by Pitts when she served as his student piano accompanist in 2001, to testify in Sacramento in support of her bill.

“By the time he initiated sex with me, I was putty in his hands. And by the time I realized I had been groomed, I was completely isolated and psychologically destroyed,” Lam said. “A law like SB 848 would have adequately educated me about grooming behaviors. I would have known that these interactions were inappropriate and reported them.”

Opposition to the bill, which has bipartisan support, is focused on due process concerns raised by employee unions that have historically opposed similar attempts to strengthen pass the trash laws in California. The California Teachers Association — the state’s largest teacher’s union, which opposed similar legislation in 2012 and again in 2018, — notably does not oppose the bill. The California Federation of Teachers and California State Employees Association, however, which together represent both teachers and the non-credentialed educators who would be included in the disciplinary database that Pérez’s bill would create, recently opposed it. Both unions cited concerns over due process as the primary reason.

“We need to ensure a policy that captures individuals that are unfit to work in education while making sure innocent and unfairly charged employees have fair access to justice,” said California Federation of Teachers legislative director Tristan Brown. “We are committed to working with the senator to make that a reality.”

Numerous other states already rely on similar hiring databases, however, which regulators have cited as key tools in keeping students safe. California is one of just 16 states that lack a comprehensive pass the trash law, a 2022 report published by the Department of Education found.

Back in the Rosemead community, many have welcomed Pérez’s bill as a needed change in a community where boundaries between teachers and students have frequently been blurred. Kristy Rowe, a Rosemead alum who graduated before Lam, testified in support of Pérez’s bill as well.

Rowe said she had a sexual relationship with Paul Arevalo, a business teacher known on campus for inviting cheerleaders to sit on his lap in between classes. Not long after Rowe met him, Arevalo was investigated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for allegedly offering to buy another female student condoms and sending her sexually explicit messages during class, disciplinary documents show. Arevalo went on to marry a former student and, after transferring to a nearby school in the district, was placed on leave in 2017 when administrators found he’d sexually harassed another student, records show. Arevalo declined to comment.

“Comprehensive legal reform is urgently needed to center the voices of potential victims, to mandate specialized training for educational personnel, and to ensure that future harm is avoided,” Rowe told lawmakers. “Addressing these gaps is not only a matter of justice, it is a moral imperative to protect children, empower survivors, and create a society where such abuse is neither tolerated nor hidden.”

Matt Drange is a freelance investigative reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area and an alumnus of Rosemead High School. He can be reached at mattdrange@gmail.com.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Los Angeles County broke ground Friday on a project that will bring dozens of new mental health beds and supportive housing to the sprawling, 110-year-old Metropolitan State Hospital campus in Norwalk.

Led by Supervisor Janice Hahn, the project includes a renovation of some of the decaying buildings on the site into 32 treatment beds within locked facilities. The $65 million in funding comes from Proposition 1, the state’s mental health funding bond passed in 2024.

“One of the biggest challenges we face in Los Angeles County right now is that we simply do not have enough places where people can get the compassionate, professional mental health care that they need,” Hahn said before the groundbreaking.

In all, county leaders plan to have 162 beds at the so-called Mental Health Care Campus, ranging from locked psychiatric beds to permanent supportive housing.

California State Senator Bob Archuleta (L) and LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn stand in front of a rendering of a remodeled bedroom at the Metropolitan State Hospital Campus in Norwalk.

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Robert Garrova

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LAist

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Hahn said part of the idea is to get help for people who have been cycling out of emergency rooms and incarceration.

“This Care Village really is a big step forward showing people that there’s a different way that we can get help to the people who need it most,” she told LAist.

At a meeting last year, county supervisors voted to sign off on a lease with the state for a 13-acre portion of the campus. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill from Sen. Bob Archuleta in 2024 that cleared the way for the lease.

One of the buildings that will be renovated into supportive housing at the Metropolitan State Hospital campus in Norwalk.

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Robert Garrova

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LAist

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The historic site 

Run by the state, the psychiatric hospital opened in 1916 and at its peak housed thousands of patients. These days, with its 162 acres, overgrown grass and boarded up buildings, the place feels mostly abandoned.

Some of the buildings feature large windows that architectural mock ups provided by the county show will remain intact, allowing light to flow into large indoor communal spaces. Officials have also said the plan is to preserve the architectural features of the buildings, which have historical landmark status.

The interior in one of the future 16-bed facilities at the Metropolitan State Hospital.

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Robert Garrova

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Laist

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What’s next

The plan is to bring several levels of care together on one campus. In all, the project calls for renovating six of the buildings on the site.

That includes:

• 32 locked psychiatric care beds, which will serve young adults between 18-25 who have acute mental health needs.
• 70 interim housing beds and short-term housing with on-site mental health services.
• 60 permanent supportive Housing apartments. These will be reserved for adults with serious mental illness who were previously unhoused.

The county’s plan also includes a shared community building with a kitchen and communal dining space.

The county estimates the interim housing will be completed late next year, with the locked beds coming in early 2028. The county did not yet have a timeline for the permanent supportive housing beds.

Long Beach residents can now receive harm reduction supplies like fentanyl test strips and overdose reversal medication for free — in the mail.

This represents an expansion of the city’s harm reduction program, launched in December 2023, which already offers in-person pick-up of supplies at several locations. More than two years later, the Long Beach Department of Health and Human Services has distributed over 6,500 doses of Narcan — an opioid overdose reversal medication — and over 21,000 test kits to check for fentanyl and xylazine — a veterinary tranquilizer that has made its way into the illicit drug supply.

Mailing supplies will allow the Health Department to reach more and different people, said Ish Salamanca, with the Health Department. The hours and locations of the department’s distribution sites don’t work for everyone, Salamanca said. And discreetly delivering the kits by mail allows the city “to reach folks who might feel a little stigmatized” picking up supplies in person.

In a November 2024 city council meeting, council members recommended expanding access to harm reduction resources in order to address what Councilwoman Suely Saro called “the crisis of our time.”

“We don’t want to take our eye off the ball on fentanyl and opioids,” Mayor Rex Richardson said in the meeting.

Months later, council members allocated $70,000 from the California Opioid Settlements, a pool of money from pharmaceutical companies and others found responsible for fueling the opioid epidemic, to fund a pilot program to mail fentanyl detection kits to 5,000 residents.

Now that pilot program is live. Within hours of the launch, Salamanca said he had received 30 requests to mail kits, compared to the five to ten requests that come in daily for in-person pick up.

Preliminary data show that fentanyl-related overdose deaths are declining in Long Beach, which the Health Department partially attributes to expanded prevention efforts, and free testing and overdose reversal supplies.

Yet non-fatal overdoses are “not dropping as much as I would want them to,” Salamanca said. And while the city’s efforts have been focused on people experiencing homelessness and using substances, he is also “seeing folks overdosing at their homes or residences,” he said, according to data from first responders.

Despite all the inroads Salamanca and his team have made, “there’s a huge hurdle that we’re about to have to overcome, which is stigma,” he said, describing future plans to hold workshops and presentations in settings ranging from high schools to senior living facilities. While the focus on fentanyl has increased awareness of its dangers, Salamanca called for broader, more transparent conversations on substance use and access to resources.

Long Beach residents can order (and customize) harm reduction kits from the Health Department and access resources here.

It’s been a deadly winter on California’s slopes, but the state has no idea how bad it really is.

In February alone, a 21-year-old skier was found dead on a black diamond at Northstar California. Witnesses reported another skier trailed blood down a Mammoth Mountain run. A fatal collision at Northstar followed yet another death within less than two weeks — and that's before a catastrophic avalanche killed nine backcountry skiers near Lake Tahoe.

“There’s been no indication that there are more injuries this year than previous years — just more media coverage around serious ones,” said John Rice, president of Ski California, an industry association for ski areas in California and Nevada.

He may be right. The problem is that right now, nobody can tell.

California does not monitor ski injuries or deaths at resorts. It does not have a threshold for injuries on the slopes that triggers investigations or intervention. And legislative efforts to require ski accident reporting have met failure after failure.

CalMatters contacted more than two dozen ski resorts listed by Ski California or the U.S. Forest Service as operating in the state. Not one responded with accident, injury or fatality data.

CalMatters also filed a public records request to the U.S. Forest Service seeking five years of incident reports from at least 24 resorts the agency said operate on land it manages. A public records specialist said that a response could take at least six months to process, in part because resorts must first review the records to flag anything they consider proprietary.

Without these statistics, ski safety experts, personal injury lawyers and snow scientists couldn't tell CalMatters whether it's been a particularly dangerous year. Whether weather, climate change, terrain or visitor counts are increasing or decreasing risk. Skiers and snowboarders can't determine for themselves the relative safety of the slopes they're paying to visit.

The California Department of Public Health calls injury data “the foundation for action.”

An unclear bargain

Twenty years ago, Dan Gregorie flew from South Carolina, where he was living at the time, to California, where he’d planned to ski with his 24-year-old daughter Jessica. As he stepped off the plane, he learned she’d had an accident.

Carrying her snowboard across a steep traverse from one lift to another slope at Alpine Meadows ski resort near Lake Tahoe, Jessica slipped and slid down an icy slope — plummeting off a cliff, with no fences or guardrails to stop her. Her boyfriend later told Gregorie she slid backwards on her belly, looking up at him, the whole time.

Jessica Gregorie was an animal lover who’d started her own dog care business in San Francisco. An athlete who’d biked across the country from Maine to the tip of Washington state to raise money for a women’s shelter. She was her parents’ only child.

First, Dan and his wife Margaret lost Jessica. Then, they lost the lawsuit Gregorie had hoped would stop future accidents. The waiver she’d signed dealt a major blow to their case. The gist of the ruling: Jessica had accepted the risks.

Gregorie disagreed. Without transparency about accident rates on the slopes, how could anyone truly know what bargain they were making?

“They have a moral obligation to fully inform people as to what the risks are that they're taking,” Gregorie said. “Most people that go skiing on a weekend expect to come home at the end.”

Gregorie, a now-retired physician who spent his career in health care management, was shocked by the lack of detailed safety information.

He founded the SnowSport Safety Foundation in 2008. Personally hiring a lobbyist, he spent over a decade pushing for legislation in California to require that ski resorts make their safety plans and accident statistics public. He also lobbied in Colorado and Maine.

“Most of it came out of my pocket. But at that point, I’d lost my daughter, and my wife,” said Gregorie. Margaret Gregorie died after a battle with ovarian cancer, two years after Jessica’s accident. “I was more than willing to spend it.”

His goal, he said, wasn’t more regulation; it was more transparency.

It almost worked.

Unknown accidents

Ski resorts in California operate under a patchwork of oversight that leaves accidents on the slopes largely opaque.

California’s workplace safety agency, Cal/OSHA, oversees ski lifts via its Amusement Ride and Tramway Unit and requires incident reports for any injuries requiring more than first aid.

The slopes are another matter.

The ski resorts operating with permits on national forest system land are required to notify the U.S. Forest Service “as soon as practicable” after fatal incidents, catastrophic injuries, search and rescue operations, problems with ski lifts and anything with the potential for serious harm, such as avalanches.

If it’s serious enough, the agency may conduct its own review.

But these accident reports are difficult to access and slow to obtain. And not all resorts operate in national forests — Northstar California Resort, for example, is largely on private land.

In court, resorts are further shielded. Ravn Whitington, lead litigation partner at Porter Simon Sierra Injury Lawyers, said that waivers and decades of court decisions have established that skiing and snowboarding come with inherent risks.

But case law, he says, hasn’t caught up to the changing conditions of the sports — something he notices when he skis with his young daughter. “People are flying by, going through slow zones, skiing out of control,” he said. “I'm skiing with a 10 foot gap between my daughter and myself, and we have people shooting that gap.”

Ski safety expert Larry Heywood, who worked for the ski industry for decades and now serves as an expert witness in lawsuits, sees resorts differently.

“They’re conscientious, and they don’t want people to get hurt,” Heywood said. “It’s not good for the business. All that press just in the last week or so with these Heavenly and Northstar deaths — there’s people who decide not to go skiing because of that, right?”

‘Unnecessary burden’

Gregorie’s lobbying efforts paid off in 2010: California lawmakers passed a bill authored by then-Assemblymember Dave Jones requiring ski resorts to prepare publicly available safety plans and establish their own policies around signage and barriers for certain collision hazards.

It also called for releasing monthly reports upon request of any skiing, snowboarding or sledding fatalities — including the cause and the location of the accident, the age of the person involved, and where medical care was provided.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who broke his femur in a skiing accident the same year Jessica Gregorie died, vetoed it — saying the requirements duplicated those of the U.S. Forest Service and wouldn’t necessarily increase safety.

He said at the time that the bill “may place an unnecessary burden on resorts.” Last winter the ski and snowboard industry in California and Nevada added $1.8 billion to state GDP and $100 million to state and local tax revenue, according to Ski California.

The next year, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed an almost identical measure, calling it “yet another exercise of the State's regulatory power for objectives that, in the ordinary course, are handled by private business or the people themselves.”

Another two-year effort to mandate that ski resorts must regularly send monthly accident reports for both serious injuries and deaths to the California Department of Public Health died in the Legislature. It never even made it to Brown’s desk.

Ski California says it has opposed legislation to increase reporting. “That legislation attempted to force untenable requirements on ski areas and didn’t find support from the industry, local legislators, or California Governors,” said Jess Weaver, spokesperson for the industry group.

Weaver blamed California’s legislative efforts on “a single individual who lacked knowledge about how ski areas operate,” and said that the industry’s present position is unchanged.

Gov. Brown declined to comment via a spokesperson, and a representative for Schwarzenegger did not respond to CalMatters' inquiry.

Jones, who later served as the state’s insurance commissioner, called the vetoes unfortunate.

“It’s disappointing that 16 years have gone by, and it continues to be the case that safety plans and reporting of fatalities or injuries is not required,” Jones said. “I don’t think sticking our head into the sand makes the risk or problem go away.”

‘Situational awareness’

Gregorie doesn’t know if his daughter Jessica would have checked Alpine Meadows’ safety statistics, had they been public.

“She was a 24-year-old woman, a young woman at that point in time. I'm not sure she would have definitively looked at it,” Gregorie said. “But I'm absolutely sure that parents who are taking their families skiing, particularly going skiing for the first time, would be doing that.”

He and other supporters of transparency aren’t necessarily arguing that, with more information, individual skiers would change their behavior. They're arguing that information can shape industries and drive competition around safety.

“Making the information public would allow consumer advocacy organizations to see what’s going on and to suggest appropriate changes, even if individuals themselves don’t change their behavior,” Jones said.

Ski California’s Weaver said that numbers without context could easily be misinterpreted. So many factors are involved in accidents, from equipment to individual behavior.

“Ski areas operate in very different environments — with varying terrain, weather conditions, visitation levels, and skier ability — so raw totals don’t accurately reflect safety performance,” Weaver said. “Furthermore, confidentiality and privacy laws prohibit us from disclosing details of any injuries reported or handled by ski patrol or other resort employees.”

The industry does collect nationwide totals. Last winter, 63 people suffered catastrophic injuries such as broken necks or backs at ski resorts, and 50 people died, according to the National Ski Areas Association’s report.

Analyses of a comprehensive state injury database by Gregorie and, later, the Los Angeles Times two years ago, suggests that the industry statistics miss thousands of serious accidents requiring emergency room visits or hospitalization.

Scientists agree that the absence of information is a problem. Without more detailed data, it’s nearly impossible to study how safety risks may change on crowded slopes or as the climate warms.

“The data is probably the biggest linchpin in really being able to say anything about it,” said Benjamin Hatchett, an earth systems scientist at Colorado State University.

An avid skier who grew up skiing around Tahoe – where he had his own share of accidents – Hatchett said such data wouldn’t deter him from one resort or another.

“You’re going to ski at the places that have the terrain, and the snow, and the ski culture and the experience that you’re looking for,” said Hatchett. But knowing where and when more injuries are occurring would fine-tune his decisionmaking. “It might change my situational awareness.”

Twenty years after his daughter’s death, Gregorie has given up on legislation. His SnowSport Safety Foundation is no longer active.

But Gregorie says he hasn’t given up the fight for transparency.

“When I talk people tell me they're going skiing, I say to them, ‘Do you know this? Do you know what you're going into?’”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.