More than a year after the private Cate School in Carpinteria commissioned an internal investigation into accounts of faculty sexual misconduct against students, a 35-page report released earlier this month details accounts of inappropriate behavior involving 17 former faculty members and stretching back to the 1960s.
The report from Oppenheimer Investigations Group LLP, which was shared with the Cate community on Dec. 15, named seven individuals, including Da’Jon James — a teacher who was fired in 2020 following allegations of misconduct and was later arrested in Colorado over allegations at a different private school. The report also describes allegations against 10 unidentified individuals.
“In a close community such as ours, the bonds created between people on the Mesa are meant to provide comfort and nurture growth, not to inflict trauma. This was where we failed,” board of trustees President Lisa Browne Stanson and Chair Wyatt Gruber wrote in a letter to the Cate community of students, alumni and parents. “We honor the survivors for the courage they have shown in coming forward to recount their painful experiences, and we thank those witnesses who joined them in helping us to understand the full nature of what occurred.”
Cate’s report comes months after the elite Thacher School in Ojai released an extraordinary 91-page report that detailed sexual misconduct allegations against faculty and revealed open secrets and long-buried trauma at a boarding school that, like Cate, has attracted some of the wealthiest families in the country.
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