A former student who impregnated a high school teacher was awarded $ 6 million in a settlement, officials in Redlands, Calif., confirmed.
Vince Finaldi, an attorney for the former student, said the egregious conduct of the Redlands Unified School District warranted the payment.
“The size of this settlement represents the gravity of the damage done to this young victim and his family,” he said in a statement.
“It also highlights the extreme malfeasance and neglect by school officials who turned a blind eye to the criminal conduct of a teacher.”
Administrators, he reiterated, “failed to protect a student.”
Laura Whitehurst, 29, was arrested in July 2013 and charged with 41 felony counts of unlawful sex acts. Yes. Forty-one felony charges.
That could have meant up to 29 years in prison.
Ultimately, she pleaded guilty to four counts of unlawful sexual intercourse and two counts of oral copulation with a person under 18.
Her sexual dalliances involved three boys at Citrus Valley and Redlands high schools during her tenure as a teacher in both locations.
As part of a plea bargain in which she admitted having the student’s baby, she was sentenced to a year in jail and released after six months.
On probation, she is a registered sex offender.
Laura Whitehurst shares custody of the love child with the former high school student, who is now 21, according to the victim’s attorneys.
In the lawsuit, attorneys for the student alleged that school officials knew of his romance with Whitehurst and failed to warn his family.
The lawsuit also claimed that a colleague of Whitehurst’s was aware of the relationship and that school officials questioned her about it.
Despite the huge payment, district officials said they were admitting no wrongdoing by settling the lawsuit, blaming Whitehurst alone.
Spokesman Tom DeLapp said the district is “not pleased with this” but settled “this tragic case once and for all so we can move forward.”
“We felt there could be serious damage to the reputation of a very fine school district” if the legal case were to be drawn out, he added.
Throwing a bit of shade, he said they ended this before “the plaintiff’s lawyers were allowed to drag the [school] through the mud all over again.”
“In the long run, $ 6 million is high, but it could have been much higher if this had been left to an empathetic jury in another city.”
DeLapp feared a jury “looking past the facts” to find a “financial scapegoat for the unprofessional, criminal actions of one individual.”
He cited the explosion of media attention, noting “there was a picture of her in the birthing suite circulated to people at the school with the boy.”
The former student who fathered Laura Whitehurst’s baby said the relationship started in 2012 when he was 16 and lasted for a year.
He told authorities Whitehurst began driving him home from school functions and spending long hours with him away from the school.
On a trip to Disneyland, she grabbed his hand and told him she wanted to kiss him, and shortly after the trip, things escalated. Hard.
She and the boy began having repeated sexual intercourse at her apartment, he said, and Whitehurst gave birth to their child in June 2013.
The boy was in attendance for the birth.
He said later that Whitehurst gave him alcohol and told him it was a “miracle pregnancy” as she did not believe she could get pregnant.
As if that weren’t a bizarre enough series of events, she even gave him a Bible on his 17th birthday and took him to church, he said.
