Port Jefferson schools to pay $16.5 million to settle suits alleging sex abuse
The high school in Port Jefferson. Long Island districts have paid more than $111 million to settle allegations of sex abuse, and there have been hundreds of lawsuits. Credit: Newsday/J. Conrad Williams Jr.
The Port Jefferson school board has voted to pay $16.5 million to settle lawsuits by seven people alleging sexual abuse decades ago.
The settlement, which is confidential and was approved Friday night, ends litigation against the district brought under the 2019 Child Victims Act, which temporarily lifted the statute of limitations to allow lawsuits about long-ago allegations.
In a statement Friday night announcing the news, the district called settlement “the best outcome for the district and avoids possible greater impact to our students and taxpayers ... and eliminated the potential of protracted trial litigation which involves inherent risk and could have resulted in significantly greater overall costs to the district."
“It is important to note that these claims were for incidents that occurred forty-five or more years ago,” the district said in the statement.
Plaintiffs attorney Anna Kull declined to comment.
Neither side disclosed how much each of the seven plaintiffs will get or other terms of the settlement.
Long Island districts have paid more than $111 million to settle allegations of sex abuse, and there have been hundreds of lawsuits.
Dozens of school districts, including Cold Spring Harbor and Harborfields, have been among those that have paid in suits by ex-students who claimed that teachers, administrators and fellow students committed sexual abuse.
In July, Newsday reported that the Herricks school district paid out nearly $50 million over the prior year to ex-students who had accused the school system of failing to do enough to shield them from sex abuse decades ago.
On Thursday, a jury in Suffolk County found the Bay Shore school district to be 100% liable for negligence in supervision and acted with reckless disregard for keeping a third-grade teacher on the job despite multiple allegations that he'd sexually abused students. On Friday, the jury awarded $25 million in damages.
In the Port Jefferson cases, the district hasn’t been able to get an insurer to pay, so the settlement will be funded through a combination of reserves and bonds issued to raise the money, the statement said.
A public meeting Nov. 12 will cover how the settlement payment will affect taxpayers, said the district’s outside spokesman, Ron Edelson. The district denies the allegations, his colleague Grace Kwon said.
One of the accusers, Michael Selter, had told Newsday that he would fear going to school because he’d never know when the high school principal at the time would call him out from class and sexually molest him in darkened places such as the auditorium, boiler room or his office.
“It’s a permanent scar,” said Selter, who attended Port Jefferson's Earl L. Vandermeulen High School, also known as Port Jefferson High School, said. He said the abuse happened between 1974 and 1977. Selter said he never told his parents about the abuse.
That principal, Anthony Prochilo, has been accused of repeatedly molesting the students as teens during the 1970s. He died in 2002 at the age of 76.
With Jim Baumbach
Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.
