Judge nixes some claims from teacher’s abuse victims
PHILADELPHIA » A federal judge has granted partial summary judgment to the defendants in a civil lawsuit involving Paul Hochschwender, the former Southeast Delco School District elementary school teacher who pleaded no contest in 2014 to inappropriately touching at least nine female students.
Hochschwender, 57, has served his criminal sentence but is a defendant in consolidated civil lawsuits filed by the parents of some of his victims. The district, Superintendent Stephen D. Butz, Assistant Superintendent Jeffrey Ryan, Assistant Principal Ashwina Mosakowski and Michael A. P. Jordan, former principal of the Darby Township School, are also named as defendants.
U.S. District Judge Gerald A. McHugh entered a lengthy memorandum and order Friday addressing summary judgment motions for the plaintiff’s Monell claims, state created danger claims and Title IX claims.
A Monell claim is one in which a local government can be held liable for the misdeeds of its employees only where they are carrying out some policy or custom of the governmental entity.
The plaintiffs allege Southeast Delco failed to properly respond to two prior incidents of Hochschwender’s apparent misconduct in 2007 and 2011, failed to protect students by not properly screening Hochschwender before hiring him, failed to have adequate policies in place and failed to adequately train administrators.
But McHugh found the Monell claims failed as a matter of law because the plaintiffs could not show Hochschwender posed “an obvious and substantial risk to his students.”
The 2007 incident, in which Hochschwender allegedly placed a fifthgrade girl’s hands in his lap “near” his penis, did not rise to the level of a reportable offense at the time, according to the order.
While the adequacy of investigating that claim might have been lacking – including having Hochschwender in the room with the student during delivery of her story – it did not show a deliberate indifference to student safety, the judge found.
The 2011 case, in which Hochschwender allegedly patted a fifth-grader on her buttocks, prompted several other students to voice their own questionable interactions with him.
Jordan allegedly investigated the claims and found that all of the complained of touching was “inadvertent,” according to the order. He claims to have interviewed three students in that instance with other district employees and to have issued an improvement plan and report, though that was denied by the other adults who were allegedly involved in the investigative process.
But even accepting as true a lack of investigation on Jordan’s part, the Monell claims still failed because they did not evidence his conduct was the result of a policy or custom at the district, the judge found.
The plaintiffs also could not show that failing to train administrators in conducting a sexual abuse investigation or properly screening Hochschwender for a teaching position would have prevented any of his criminal behavior.
Though Hochschwender left a prior teaching position in the Radnor School District under what the complaint deems “a cloud of serious allegations of child abuse,” the court found Southeast Delco checked his criminal record and child abuse record, which were clean, before offering him a job.
The plaintiffs argued that a letter to Hochschwender from a principal at Radnor following the allegations should have tipped off administrators at Southeast Delco that he should not be hired.
But the judge found that even if the defendants knew of the letter through further investigation, it would have little consequence because no criminal charges were ever filed and Hochschwender returned to regular teaching at Radnor afterwards.
Four plaintiffs abused by Hochschwender in the 2013-2014 school year also raised “state-created danger” claims against Jordan and Ryan for allowing their abuser to be transferred to teaching second grade after the 2011 allegations.
Jordan claims he believed Hochschwender was “too risky” to have in the building and communicated that concern to Ryan, who transferred Hochschwender to teach a lower grade over Jordan’s objections, according to the order.
Ryan claims the reassignment was the result of a personnel shake-up that was Jordan’s call and that he merely “signed off” on the transfer. Ryan says he had no knowledge of the 2011 allegations at that time, according to the order.
In either scenario, the judge found Ryan could not be held liable. Either he did not know of the allegations, or he relied on Jordan’s ultimate determination that the 2011 allegations were “inadvertent” touching, and Jordan’s subsequent misgivings were too vague to rise to the level of deliberate indifference on Ryan’s behalf.
McHugh found the state-created danger claim against Jordan could proceed, however. If it is true that Jordan “utterly failed” to investigate a pattern of abuse allegations against Hochschwender and failed to communicate the substance of those allegations to any other responsible administrators, then the decision to transfer Hochschwender to a second-grade classroom could demonstrate callous disregard to the risk he would pose to his students, according to the order.
The judge also denied Jordan’s motion that he is entitled to qualified immunity because Hochschwender’s transfer to the second-grade classroom in the wake of the 2011 allegations signaled “encouragement, condonation, or toleration (of) his behavior.”
The district might also be liable under Title IX if the plaintiffs can show at trial that an appropriate person at the school had actual knowledge of facts indicating a substantial danger to students and acted with deliberate indifference to that danger, according to the order.
While the judge found that was not the case for the plaintiff in the 2011 incident, he held that the remaining plaintiffs, whose allegations came later, could make such a claim.
No additional court dates had been set as of Tuesday.