Cost of Extended SOL
A recent article highlights the unintended consequences of extending the statute of limitations for abuse claims. In 2020, California made important changes to its statute of limitations, with the noble goal of allowing survivors to hold institutions accountable. The unintended effect, however, has been to harm current students and institutions.
AB 218, which took effect in 2020, changed the game for childhood sexual abuse lawsuits in California. It temporarily lifted the statute of limitations, giving survivors a three-year window to file claims for abuses dating back as far as the 1940s. It also extended the age limit for filing claims to 40 and made it easier to sue public entities like school districts and counties. The goal was to ensure survivors could seek justice, even decades later, and to hold institutions accountable for failing to protect kids.
The fallout has been staggering. Over 1,000 lawsuits have been filed against California school districts and counties, with settlements totaling nearly $3 billion for schools alone. Individual payouts often range from $5 million to $10 million, with some, like a $135 million verdict against Moreno Valley Unified, reaching jaw-dropping heights.
The verdicts have pushed some school districts to the edge of bankruptcy. Carpinteria Unified, a small, predominantly low-income Latino district near Santa Barbara, is facing four lawsuits tied to a principal convicted in 1986 for abuses from the 1970s and 1980s. Each suit could cost $5 million to $10 million—against a $42 million budget. According to Superintendent Diana Rigby, the district has already spent $750,000 on legal fees, forcing layoffs, larger class sizes, and cuts to field trips and enrichment programs. Because the insurance company that issued the policy back then has gone out of business, the school district has to foot the entire bill.
Other schools face lawsuits from the 1970s. With no historical records or insurance to cover these claims, the districts face potential state takeover. Even districts that haven’t been sued are seeing insurance costs skyrocket due to shared risk pools.
If the only students involved were the victims, these financial burdens might seem fair. However, the budget cuts are harming current students, who lose out on programs and resources, even though they had no connection to the decades-old abuses. As one superintendent explained it, children are being forced to “pay for crimes that happened 50 years ago, that they had nothing to do with.”
Private institutions undoubtedly are facing the same pressures. The University of North Carolina School of the Arts, though not in California settled for $12.5 million with 65 victims alleging abuse over decades, mostly 30-50 years ago. The lack of historical insurance coverage is a common issue—many policies from decades ago don’t exist or won’t cover old claims, leaving private institutions to drain reserves or cut services. I’ve heard anecdotal evidence of many institutions cutting back on programs to deal with budget pressures. Worse, I’ve heard of good people opting out of serving youth entirely, preferring to start a less risky business.
There doesn’t seem to be any appetite for lessening the burden on youth-serving organizations for the actions of long-ago and often dead predators. Legislators, however, need to find a way to balance all of the competing needs before trial attorneys succeed in killing the goose that is laying this golden egg of catastrophic verdicts.
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