Miramonte Elementary School

Sexual misconduct allegations at Miramonte Elementary School sparked a surge of investigations of Los Angeles teachers, pushing the ranks of those in "teacher jail" to more than 300 - and prompting officials this week to consider the rights of accused employees. On Tuesday, the Board of Education will weigh a proposal designed to speed up and improve investigations, in hopes of quickly ousting the guilty and exonerating the innocent. "You don't need 300 days to figure out who's a monster," said Carpenter Elementary parent Julia Bricklin.

As the scandal over two Miramonte Elementary School teachers accused of committing lewd acts on children grows, it's becoming clear the Los Angeles Unified School District faces a heavy financial cost. Miramonte will reopen Thursday with an all-new slate of teachers and administrators as well as custodians and cafeteria workers. But L.A. Unified will continue to pay the old staff even as they wait out the investigations at a high school under construction a few miles away. It remains unclear how long this arrangement will last; the investigations are expected to take months to complete.

In June 2009, the mother of a fourth-grader made a discovery that is now the latest incident under investigation at Miramonte Elementary School: a teacher's aide was allegedly writing love letters to her 11-year-old son. One letter, meant as a short-term farewell note, included a passage that the mother found especially disturbing: "When I was writing this letter, I was crying. My heart was breaking into pieces," wrote the teacher's aide, who has been identified as Areceli Luisjuan.

In the fall of 2010, a drugstore photo technician was running a batch of 35-millimeter film when a disturbing image tumbled out of the machine — a child, blindfolded with a white cloth and gagged with clear packing tape. From that first photograph, detectives spent the next year following a trail that led them to a South Los Angeles elementary school. They say they found acts of staggering depravity. There were more photos, it turned out — 400 more, traced to an apartment in nearby Torrance, then to a bustling schoolhouse in South Los Angeles.

Mark Berndt, the teacher accused of committing lewd acts against nearly two dozen elementary school children, was the target of a police investigation 18 years ago when a female student reported that he had tried to fondle her, authorities said. The alleged incident occurred in September 1993, though officials said the girl did not tell her mother about it until four months later, after seeing an episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" that explained the difference between "good touches" and "bad touches.

Los Angeles schools chief John Deasy blasted state lawmakers Thursday for not passing a bill to speed up the teacher-dismissal process, which he and others pushed following the sex-abuse scandal at Miramonte Elementary School. The bill fell one vote short of clearing an Assembly education committee when six of the seven Democratic members either opposed it or abstained. Committee Chairwoman Julia Brownley (D-Oak Park) supported the bill, as did four Republican colleagues. The measure would have allowed school boards to immediately suspend without pay a teacher or administrator notified of dismissal for "serious and egregious unprofessional conduct" involving sex abuse, drugs or violence toward children.

After checking classroom lists attached to orange poster boards outside Miramonte Elementary School on Tuesday, about 900 children passed through an entry gate and headed for the blacktop. A dozen students played kickball for as long as they could get away with it. One boy fist-bumped a teacher he recognized. Just the normal bustle and excitement of the first day of school. But to Miramonte's teachers, it was redemption. After the January arrest of former colleague Mark Berndt for alleged lewd conduct, followed by the arrest of a second teacher for unrelated alleged lewd conduct, the entire staff had been ordered off the campus.

Memories of molestations by Roman Catholic priests are fresh in the public's mind, along with the cover-ups of those crimes by church leaders. Less remembered is the McMartin Pre-School case of the late 1980s. The accusations of sexual abuse and satanic rituals at that family-run preschool in Manhattan Beach panicked a generation of parents. But the case eventually fell apart because some of the allegations were proved untrue, and no one was ever convicted. Which one of these more closely resembles the situation at Miramonte Elementary School, where the entire staff will be replaced on Thursday?

For far too long it has been far too difficult for California schools to fire even the worst teachers. But three similar bills, all scheduled to be heard in committee on Wednesday, contain provisions that undermine their generally smart efforts to reform the process. We're not fans of the current trend of blaming teachers for everything that isn't working in schools, but there is no doubt that some teachers do not deserve to stay in their jobs. A long list of legal requirements ties districts' hands when it comes to firing problematic teachers, and the process often drags on for years.

The allegations of sexual molestation involving two teachers at Miramonte Elementary School have rightly rocked the Los Angeles Unified School District. Now that the alarm has been raised and the need to watch for and report suspicious behavior is better understood, more reports have arisen at other schools of possible abuses. And though it was an extreme move, we also supported the shifting and temporary replacement of the entire staff of Miramonte until the investigation has been completed, to ensure that students are protected.