$8.25 Million Settlement for Three Girls Molested by Fifth-Grade Teacher at Paradise Valley Elementary

From late 2012 through October 2014, John Loyd, a fifth-grade teacher at Paradise Valley Elementary School in Morgan Hill, California, isolated three girls in his classroom during lunch and recess. He covered the windows with paper to block the view from the hallway. The abuse continued across two school years while Loyd taught in the Morgan Hill Unified School District, where he had worked since 2000.

Parents raised concerns with school administrators as early as 2009. Those complaints were never forwarded to law enforcement, and nothing appeared in Loyd's personnel file. Loyd was eventually arrested and, in 2015, pleaded no contest to four felony counts of lewd and lascivious acts on a child. A Santa Clara County judge sentenced him to 40 years in state prison.

Attorney B. Robert Allard filed a civil suit against the district on behalf of the three victims' families, arguing the school failed to act on repeated warning signs and lacked any formal system for recognizing grooming behavior. The complaint centered on the district's failure to translate its mandatory-reporting obligations into practical training that staff could apply before abuse escalated to a reportable threshold.

On March 15, 2017, the district finalized an $8.25 million settlement, allocating $2.75 million per family in structured payments. As a condition of the agreement, the district committed to implementing predator-identification training for all staff and developing a sexual-abuse prevention curriculum for students, which Allard described as rare among California school districts at the time.

The settlement covered only the three Paradise Valley victims. A fourth alleged incident, dating to 2005 at a different district school, was not included in the civil action.