The San Diego Unified School District was negligent in failing to prevent a former teacher’s months-long sexual abuse of a student, a jury decided Wednesday.

The jury awarded $2.1 million in damages to the victim, a former student who is now 19, at the end of a trial that lasted two and a half weeks.

Toni Sutton, 40, a former Spanish teacher at Crawford High School, was sentenced to prison two years ago for having sex with the male student during a period of about eight months in 2015 and 2016.

She had sex with the student in her classroom dozens of times during first period with the door locked while the student was supposed to be in class, court documents showed, and the boy’s attendance suffered. She also had sex with him at her home and in her car.


In court documents and testimony, sources described how Sutton groomed the student, referred to as James Doe, for a sexual relationship by buying food for him, spending lots of time with him outside of class and driving him to school. The first sexual abuse occurred when the boy was 15 and the teacher was 37, according to court records.

But there was another problem besides Sutton’s abuse, attorneys for the student argued. They said school officials long ignored red flags about Sutton’s behavior, and it took too long for them to take action.

Several teachers had known months before Sutton’s arrest that Doe was missing class to be with Sutton in her classroom, according to documents and testimony. They had emailed Sutton, asking where Doe was, and she replied multiple times that he was with her. School employees knew Doe’s attendance was poor.

School administrators had also previously warned Sutton that she shouldn’t be sharing explicit personal details with students, according to documents and testimony. They had ordered her on multiple occasions to stop spending so much personal time in the classroom with students, Doe’s attorneys argued.


Yet school officials did not follow up with Sutton to ensure she stopped her behavior, attorneys said.

“Nobody ever follows up on anything here,” said Michael Kirby, one of Doe’s attorneys, during the trial. “There was no exercise of reasonable care in this case.”

She was also never officially disciplined or written up for her questionable behavior in her personnel files, he said.

“I couldn’t believe there was no site file,” said one juror, who asked to remain anonymous, interviewed after the verdict. “She could’ve been written up for anything.”


Key to Doe’s case was a 97-page report and testimony by Charol Shakeshaft of Virginia Commonwealth University, an expert on educational leadership and student sexual abuse who evaluates school sexual misconduct policies. Shakeshaft wrote the report for Doe’s attorneys.

Shakeshaft found that, at the time of Doe’s abuse, San Diego Unified’s policies “did not meet the standard of care” in preventing adult sexual abuse of students.

The policies and training that Crawford High School employees had access to did not detail how to identify and report behaviors that could be signs of adult-to-student sexual abuse, Shakeshaft, determined after studying the district’s policies, training and the hundreds of other documents related to Doe’s case.

Shakeshaft also said she found no evidence that students or parents had been trained on adult-student misconduct or sexual harassment.


“Although employees at Crawford High School received training, two important aspects – red flags and bystander responsibility – were missing,” Shakeshaft wrote in her report.

She noted that San Diego Unified has expanded its policies related to educator sexual misconduct since the Sutton case. That included a faculty handbook last school year prohibiting faculty from crossing professional boundaries in relationships with students and offering guidance on student attendance and mandated reporter requirements.

On Wednesday, the jury attributed to the school district 40 percent of the harm the student suffered, and 60 percent to Sutton. Sutton no longer works for the district and was stripped of her California teaching license.

Kirby said the verdict means vindication and “relief that it’s going to be over” for Doe, who was not in the courtroom when the verdict was read.


Attorneys for the school district, on the other hand, argued during the trial that school employees had done what they reasonably could to address Doe’s attendance problems and Sutton’s conduct.

“We do not believe that the school district employees were careless or negligent, that they cared deeply for the students,” defense attorney Michael Sullivan said Wednesday after the verdict was read.

Defense attorneys also argued that Crawford employees responded appropriately once they realized that Sutton had been abusing Doe.

Sullivan said the “vast, vast majority” of the blame for the abuse belonged to Sutton, rather than school district employees.


“They performed like reasonable people in difficult circumstances,” Sullivan said during the trial’s closing arguments. “Bad things can happen even when everyone takes action. We can’t presume that because this happened, somebody other than Ms. Sutton was responsible.”

In the months following Sutton’s arrest, Doe suffered from depression, embarrassment and guilt, said San Diego psychiatrist and physician Calvin Colarusso, who diagnosed Doe with post-traumatic stress disorder. The $2.1 million was awarded to pay for those emotional damages and for counseling.

“This is unfortunately an all-too typical case of child sex abuse,” Colarusso said while testifying during the trial. “This boy was vulnerable because of his living circumstances. She expertly groomed him and took advantage of him to deal with whatever issues she was dealing with.”

This isn’t the first time San Diego Unified has been ordered to pay for failing to stop a teacher’s sexual abuse of a student. In 2009, a former student at the School of Creative and Performing Arts was awarded $1.25 million.


In that case, the teacher was a male and the student was a female, and the age difference was similar to the Sutton case. The district in that case was also assigned 40 percent of the blame, and was ordered to pay $650,000 because of how responsibility was allocated.

Spokeswoman Maureen Magee said the district’s share of the Sutton award would be about $840,000. She said the district is reviewing whether to appeal.