San Jose, USA - The Seventh-day Adventist Church has agreed to pay $3.5 million and alter its policies to settle lawsuits filed by five men who said they were molested by teachers when they were students at a church boarding school.
A spokesman for the Central California Conference of the Adventist Church, Caron Oswald, said the church was "deeply saddened" by the lawsuit allegations and hoped the settlements would "bring closure for those involved."
The men claimed they were molested during the 1980s by two teachers who worked at the Monterey Bay Academy, which is near San Jose. The allegations included groping in cars off-campus, rape and supplying liquor and drugs in the dormitories.
One of the teachers, Ronald Wittlake, shot himself to death when the accusations became public in 2003. The other, Lowell Nelson, has said the allegations are "absolutely not true."
"What you had here was something that went back 20 years," said Victor Elliott, a church attorney. "The circumstances of screening of teachers and supervision (were) not up to current-day standards."
The school now requires teachers to sign a child-abuse reporting policy, limits staff and faculty access to dormitories, and bars school employees from driving students off-campus alone.
"What happened to me and others was a tragedy that could easily have been prevented," said one of the plaintiffs, Michael Weston. "It wasn't prevented because the educational system wasn't prepared to deal with this problem."