New York State Budget Education

Small School Districts Face Costs of Settling Decades-Old Abuse Claims

Hundreds of Child Victims Act cases have been filed against New York schools, some over accused serial offenders that could leave districts with tens of millions of dollars in liability.

Bianca Fortis · September 5, 2024

Gov. Andrew Cuomo signs the Child Victims Act in 2019, surrounded by proponents of the bill. | Don Pollard/Office of the Governor

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It was the fall of 1978, and the 13-year-old boy was reluctant to attend his counseling session.

Vincent Festa, the school psychologist at Herricks Middle School and High School in North Hempstead, had a reputation. Around the Long Island schools, students reportedly referred to him as “Festa the Molesta.”

On his third appointment with Festa, the seventh grader’s fears came true, he said: The psychologist molested him. The boy said Festa threatened to send him to a boarding school upstate if he told anyone what happened.

“I was pretty much shocked, is the best way I can describe it,” the former student later recalled.

When the student’s older sister discovered he was being abused, the siblings told their parents, who met with the school’s assistant principal the next morning. The assistant principal said he would handle the situation internally.

“He was very defensive,” the former student, referred to as John Doe R.D. in court records, said in a deposition. “I guess, Festa was his top psychologist there and he pleaded with my father to keep it internal and not go into any type of higher-ups, whether it be administration higher up or the police.”

For the next several weeks, Festa continued to pull the student out of class to bring him to his office, until the student finally ended up in the hospital. In 1993, Festa pleaded guilty to sex crimes in a separate case involving teenage boys in his neighborhood of Ronkonkoma. He was later sentenced to five years probation. He died in 2011.

Now, more than 40 years later, John Doe R.D. is one of 21 individuals who have sued the Herricks Union Free School District alleging Festa abused them. They have filed claims under New York’s Child Victims Act, passed by the state legislature in 2019 to extend the statute of limitations for filing civil suits over alleged child sexual abuse. Nearly 11,000 claims have been filed statewide, according to Child USA, a think tank that advocates for statute of limitations reform in child abuse cases.

The claims reveal long-hidden, rampant abuse at schools, religious institutions, hospitals, youth organizations, and other sites, according to an analysis of state court records. Thousands of claims have been filed against jurisdictions of the Catholic Church. But there are also cases against other high-profile institutions like the Boy Scouts of America and Rockefeller University Hospital, where pediatric endocrinologist Reginald Archibald is accused of abusing hundreds of patients.

And hundreds of civil suits have been filed against New York public school districts over abuse by alleged perpetrators, including teachers, school administrators, teachers’ aides, guidance counselors, custodial workers, bus paraprofessionals, and other students.

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Carina Nixon, a senior staff attorney at Child USA, said it can take decades for a survivor of child sexual abuse to come to terms with their experience.

“A lot of times, these survivors have been struggling in silence for decades, holding onto this horrible act that was committed against them,” she said. “Being able to hold their abuser accountable, or in some cases, institutions that covered up the abuse, is part of the healing process for survivors.” Restitution can also help cover medical for therapy or counseling, she added.

The wave of lawsuits has forced school districts to grapple with reports of long-ago abuse, often by serial offenders who were allegedly allowed to continue their crimes over many years and many victims. It has also resulted in settlement payouts that have left smaller school districts with potentially devastating budget shortfalls, spurring a proposal in Albany to bail them out with state funds.

One in three schools has faced at least one claim under the Child Victims Act, according to estimates by the New York State Council of School Superintendents.

“Some of these claims are 40 to 50 years old, very difficult to defend against, and schools are using taxpayer dollars to settle these claims from decades ago,” said Greg Berck, the organization’s assistant director for governmental relations. “The loss of those dollars impacts current students and taxpayers who didn’t even live there at the time these claims occurred.”

School districts in every corner of the state have been affected by claims filed under the Child Victims Act.

The Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda Union Free School District, north of Buffalo, has seen the most cases of any school district outside New York City, with 47 cases filed under the CVA. Of these, 35 involve a single teacher: Arthur Werner, who taught fifth grade at Herbert Hoover Elementary School for more than 35 years until his retirement in 1993.

The plaintiffs say Werner sexually abused dozens of male students and forced other boys in the classroom to watch. The abuse allegedly took place between 1963 and 1992. (Werner did not reply to requests for comment.)

In 2022, the district chose to settle the cases involving Werner for $17.5 million — just over 10 percent of its annual budget — after considering the potential cost of 35 separate trials. The district said in a statement that it didn’t have insurance coverage for the lawsuits and would be responsible for paying the full settlement amount. Ultimately, the district decided to pay $7.5 million directly and obtained bond financing for the rest; a district spokesperson did not answer questions about how the bonds will be paid off.

The Herricks Union Free School District was similarly faced with multiple claims over alleged repeat offenders. Of 28 suits filed, 21 involved Festa. One went to trial, with a jury finding that the school district was not negligent. But the district has settled the rest of the cases out of court.

Another six claims against the Herricks Union Free School District involved allegations against Jerome Cohen, a former Denton Avenue School teacher who is accused of abusing boys in his classroom in the 1980s. After a student complained, several administrators interviewed the student, his parents, and Cohen, according to a 1982 district memo included in court filings. The then-superintendent requested that Cohen undergo a psychiatric evaluation, then determined that the allegation was unsubstantiated and that there was “no cause for taking any action.” The Cohen cases have been settled by the district for an undisclosed sum. Cohen denied the allegations in a deposition; he and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.

Throughout the 2023–2024 school year, the district’s Board of Education had to increase its allocation for Child Victims Act settlements three times using unspent money in the district’s budget. The final settlement payout was more than $48 million, according to a Newsday investigation. The Herricks school district has turned to bond financing to help cover the payout, according to board documents; the bonds are to be paid off by dipping into local property tax revenues.

“If school districts fail or foster care agencies fail, ultimately, the state is going to be left holding the bag.”

—Assemblymember Jen Lunsford

Out of 21 cases filed against the Rochester City School District, 11 involve Edwin Fleming, a former music teacher and choral director at West and East High Schools. In a deposition, one plaintiff alleged that in 1975, during her freshman year at East High School, Fleming would rape her in his office or in a locked practice room after school and threatened that if she tried to report him, he would make sure she didn’t graduate high school or go to college. She said that a few years after she graduated, when she did tell administrators, Fleming was allowed to resign but no other action was taken.

In an email, Fleming denied the accusations, calling them a “pattern of lies.” He said the practice rooms and office were shared, making the rape allegation “impossible.”

The board has settled five of the Fleming cases, according to district records. One of the plaintiffs died before the agreement was reached. So far, the total settlement amount is $4.65 million; the district will pay about $2.4 million and the rest will be covered by general liability insurance, according to the records.

New York City, the largest district in the state, has seen the most claims filed: more than 300, stemming from abuse that occurred as early as the 1950s. In one Staten Island case, a plaintiff said that in 1995, when he was 11, he told the school’s dean that a school employee had abused him in the gymnasium. The dean threatened the student with expulsion if he reported the abuse to the police, according to the plaintiff.

One Queens case that went to trial, in which a woman alleged that her middle school social studies teacher abused her for years, resulted in a $160 million judgment for the plaintiff, possibly the largest judgment in a Child Victims Act Case, according to reporting by the New York Law Journal.

Assemblymember Jen Lunsford of East Rochester said the state is beginning to see the financial ramifications of the Child Victims Act. She pointed to school districts whose reserves have been depleted and foster care agencies that have gone bankrupt.

In the last two legislative sessions, Lunsford has sponsored a bill to create a $200 million state fund that would provide reimbursement grants to cover large settlements of cases filed under the law, but the bill has yet to pass.

The fund would be available to public schools and foster care agencies, because the state is legally mandated to provide both of those services, Lunsford said. And it would also only be available to districts or agencies who do not have liability insurance that would cover the period of time in question.

“As much as the Boys and Girls Club and the Boy Scouts provide valuable services to our community, if they don’t exist, no one is in violation of anything,” she said. “If school districts fail or foster care agencies fail, ultimately, the state is going to be left holding the bag and having to fill that gap, while the students that are hurt as the system is failing are sort of washed out.” Lunsford plans to push for the bill again during the next session’s budget negotiations.

Jay Worona, the deputy executive director of the New York State School Boards Association, said the organization supports Lunsford’s bill, because of the financial impact the Child Victims Act may have on school budgets.

“Victims should be made whole, but when the district finds itself in that position, that money has to come from somewhere,” he said. “We really believe there could be a happy medium where people get compensated appropriately, and current students don’t end up suffering the consequences.”