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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. Lawmakers are expected to vote on a redistricting plan aimed at countering a similar move by the Texas Legislature. Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters

“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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.