Student sues Aspire, Notre Dame de Namur over sexual abuse
A former East Palo Alto Phoenix Academy student who was sexually abused by a teacher in 2015 filed a lawsuit Monday against the school’s operator and the college that trained the instructor.
The lawsuit filed on behalf of the victim by Lewis & Llewellyn LLP against Phoenix Academy operator Aspire Public Schools, Notre Dame de Namur University and the academy’s then-principal Elisha Jackson seeks unspecified damages for months of alleged physical and psychological abuse inside and outside the classroom.
It alleges that Aspire and Phoenix Academy administrators knew about the abuse but did nothing about it, and that Notre Dame de Namur failed to properly supervise the teacher — Danielle Matko, then an intern with just a few months of classroom experience.
“Plaintiff is filing this lawsuit in order to hold Aspire accountable and make sure that schools are doing everything they can protecting their students from abuse,” Ryan B. Erickson, an attorney with Lewis & Llewellyn, said in a June 29 email. “Aspire’s betrayal of that trust led to the repeated sexual abuse of children during school hours in a school classroom.”
Matko, 35, of Belmont, was convicted in September on four counts of child molestation against the student, who was a 15-year-old sophomore at the time. Matko also was convicted for committing a lewd act on a minor age 14 or 15 involving a separate student. She was sentenced to
“Had Aspire and NDNU performed adequate supervision of Matko ... they would have observed her wildly inappropriate behavior.”
— Lawsuit against Matko
five years in state prison.
According to the lawsuit, as soon as Matko began teaching the boy’s sophomore English class, she “began laying the groundwork to rape him.”
It states that she began the 2015-16 school year by asking for each student’s personal cellphone number and having the students write an essay about their personal struggles. That allowed her to to assess the victim’s vulnerabilities and begin “grooming him for abuse,” the lawsuit states.
Matko texted the boy “at all hours of the day,” the suit states. The first texts were about his school assignments, then later ones quickly escalated to “sexual
overtures” and showing him her naked body. Matko began spending time alone with the boy in her classroom with the door closed, a violation of Aspire’s policy, leading to multiple occasions in which she performed oral sex on the boy, the lawsuit states.
After rumors of Matko’s relationship with the boy spread, she threatened to sue him for slander on or near Nov. 16, 2015, according to the lawsuit.
Because of the defendants’ failure to prevent or appropriately address the abuse against the boy, he was forced to change schools, the suit says. Family members at Matko’s trial said the boy once had dreams of playing soccer at UC-Santa Barbara but lost his motivation for school and sports following the abuse. He is now is 18 and still lives in Palo Alto.
“Had Aspire and NDNU performed adequate supervision of Matko, as they were required to do by California state law, they would have observed her wildly inappropriate behavior,” the lawsuit states. “Rumors of Ms. Matko’s shocking behavior were so widespread at the school that two school officials confronted Plaintiff and/or Matko about such behavior and rumors that she was having a sexually abusive relationship with Plaintiff. Yet no school employees or administrators reported their reasonable suspicion of abuse to the (proper) authorities, as is required under California law.”
Aspire and Notre Dame de Namur could not be reached for comment on this story.