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Judge OKs expanded civil suit against Ogden School District over teacher sex abuse

By Mark Shenefelt - | Jan 5, 2023

PATRICK CARR, Standard-Examiner

Mound Fort Junior High is shown with Mount Ogden in the background on Monday, Aug. 24, 2020.

OGDEN — The Ogden School District failed to update its policies after several cases of teachers preying upon students before another teacher sexually abused girls in 2015-16, one of those latter victims alleged Wednesday in an expanded civil suit.

The district does not dispute that Drew Tutt committed the crimes — he served three years in prison before being paroled in 2021 — but state attorneys have said that officials were not deliberately indifferent to his activities and that the district was not lax on enforcement.

However, U.S. Magistrate Judge Daphne Oberg ruled Wednesday in Salt Lake City that the victim, now an adult, may expand her suit after her attorneys learned last fall during a deposition of the district’s human resources director that policies had not been updated before Tutt’s misconduct.

Before the deposition, the woman and her attorneys said they were “unaware of the extent of the school district’s policy or custom of failing to address and investigate boundary violations of teachers,” the judge’s order said.

“The record shows (the woman) repeatedly tried to obtain information on the school district’s policy responses to previous sexual misconduct by teachers, but she was met with unclear and contradictory responses,” the judge wrote.

The woman is known as Jane Doe 1 in the suit. The court has agreed to the use of the pseudonym because the plaintiff was a child sexual abuse victim.

By her ruling, Oberg gave approval to the woman’s attorneys to file an amended complaint against the district with the allegations of federal Title IX violations fleshed out with the new information.

That updated complaint was filed later Wednesday.

“The district had a clear pattern, since at least 2012, of teachers sexually grooming underage students through particular methods such as inappropriate messaging and school positions such as teacher’s assistants,” the complaint said, adding that the district “did not meaningfully modify its policies or training to effectively combat the problem.”

Tutt groomed several girls at Mound Fort Junior High School with one-on-one lunches in his classroom, appointments as teacher’s aides and adding them on social media applications, the suit said. The conduct advanced to explicit texts and images and then sexual assault, the suit said.

The plaintiff’s mother complained to school officials about inappropriate actions by Tutt and was told it had been taken care of, according to the suit.

Utah Attorney General’s Office assistant attorneys are representing the school district in the case. They have repeatedly denied wrongdoing by the district and also have argued that many of the allegations are barred on procedural grounds.

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