El Monte school officials had warning signs that Richard Paul Daniels was having inappropriate interactions with the girls in his high school classes — he even had a conviction for it — but they failed to take decisive action that would have prevented him from having sex with a student in 2015.
Those mistakes and others caught up to the El Monte Union High School District on Thursday, when a Los Angeles jury ordered the school system to pay $2 million in damages.
The El Monte district serves about 9,000 high school students in the city of El Monte, located in the San Gabriel Valley, east of downtown L.A.
When Daniels was arrested in 2015, he already had a record of misconduct with students from 2004. He had pleaded guilty to one count of battery after originally being charged with one count of a lewd act on a child and three counts of misdemeanor child annoying or molestation.
Read the full story at LATimes.com.