School district hit with second lawsuit
Plaintiff’s lawyers: School officials allegedly initially downplayed sexual misconduct by music teacher
A second lawsuit was filed Wednesday against a South San Jose school district, alleging administrators initially downplayed sexual misconduct by a music teacher at Dartmouth Middle School, who was later charged with sexually assaulting two female students at the school.
In the lawsuit, filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court, the plaintiff, identified as Jane Doe, alleges that Samuel Neipp, 36, of Gilroy, who taught music at the school, abused her for three years, beginning when she was 12. Now 22, she is one of two women who came forward last year to press charges against Neipp. An earlier lawsuit also alleged that the Union School District covered up abuses by Neipp, even after at least one parent alerted administrators to his troubling behavior.
“The school’s administrators had multiple complaints about this teacher’s improper interactions with adolescent girls and all they did was warn him to stop,” Dave Ring, the plaintiff’s Los Angeles-based attorney, said in a statement. “He should have been terminated immediately.”
The first lawsuit, filed last month on behalf of two former students, contained similar allegations and called on the district to limit social media interactions and texts between
teachers and students. It also asks the court to order that the district establish policies to protect against further instances of sexual abuse, including training staff to recognize when a teacher is “grooming” a student for sexual activity, preventing the doors of teacher’s offices from being locked from the inside, and limiting private contact between teachers and students.
The new lawsuit seeks unspecified damages. An attorney for the district declined comment Thursday, saying they had not received the suit, and referred back to a statement released after the first suit was filed, in which district officials called the allegations in the first lawsuit “disturbing” and “completely at odds with our district’s values and goals.”
“The district cares deeply about every student at every one of its schools,” the statement read. “Administration, teachers and staff will continue to work towards ensuring that every one of our students feels safe at school.”
Authorities arrested Neipp in 2017 after allegations that he threatened to post nude photos online of one of his victims, who later accused him of molesting her for about three years starting when she was 13. A second victim, the plaintiff in Wednesday’s filing, came forward after hearing that Neipp had been arrested.
Neipp faces 43 charges of child molestation and is being held on $2.375 mil- lion bail at Elmwood men’s jail, awaiting a trial date. If convicted, he could face more than 200 years in prison.
Doe was 12 years old when she entered Dartmouth, but it didn’t take long before Neipp, a music teacher in his late 20s, began sending text messages and emails to her and regularly spending time alone with her in his classroom, the suit alleges. The next year, he asked Doe to be his classroom aide.
It was then that Neipp began making sexually suggestive remarks, hold- ing her hand and kissing and touching her while they were alone together in his classroom, according to the suit. In September 2009, administrators admonished Neipp for spending too much time with Doe, but took no further action and the contact continued, the suit alleges.
Doe began attending high school in the fall of 2010, but would sometimes visit the middle school. When she did, Neipp would continue to sexually abuse her during and after school hours, according to the lawsuit, and the abuse oc- curred at least weekly until July 2011. Doe then tried to distance herself from Neipp, but he continued to contact her for several years, according to court documents.
It wasn’t until the fall of 2017, when Doe was a 21 year- old senior in college, that she learned that Neipp had abused other girls. She called police and reported the abuse for the first time, her attorneys said.