BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
Legal settlements are adding up for the Palo Alto Unified School District.
The district has paid parents and former employees over $4.6 million since February to stop lawsuits, according to a review of court records and public documents.
Two more settlements are in the works. One is with former Palo Alto High School student Joshua Vasquez, who said he was bullied in 2021, and school leaders did nothing to help.
The other is with a mother who said her daughter was touched inappropriately by three boys in kindergarten at Ohlone Elementary School in February 2024. The principal and investigators allegedly downplayed the touching as a game and wouldn’t move the girl to a different class.
The district’s largest settlement was with former Fletcher Middle School teacher Peter Colombo, who sued the district after he was falsely accused of raping a student in 2002.
Colombo said former Superintendent Don Austin withheld documents showing that he worked at a
different school at the time of the accusation. The board agreed to pay Colombo $3.25 million to drop his lawsuit on Feb. 10.
Austin resigned on Feb. 20. The board paid him $596,802, and both sides agreed not to sue each other.
Austin’s settlement is now the subject of a lawsuit by parents Jane Hayes Aishin and Edith Cohen, who said the board circumvented a state law that limits payouts to one year’s salary.
To get around the cap, the board paid Austin as “superintendent emeritus” through the end of the school year, in addition to a lump sum of one year’s salary.
Austin was replaced by Deputy Superintendent Trent Bahadursingh, who lasted just 22 days on the job. The board paid Bahadursingh $346,673 to resign on March 17.
The board never gave a reason for why Austin or Bahadursingh left.
The district settled a lawsuit filed by parents William Nee and Wei-Wei Lin on April 15.
Nee and Lin said they requested hundreds of documents related to special education in November 2022, but the district never released the documents in violation of the California Public Records Act.
The district agreed to pay $29,459 in attorney fees and release the documents, court records show. But Nee and Lin’s attorney David Tollner said he’s still waiting for the district to fulfill the records request.
“Nothing has come in yet. Not a single document,” Tollner said in an email on Tuesday.
The latest settlement is with special education coordinator Laurie Garcia, who said her supervisors wouldn’t reduce her workload when she was depressed.
The district paid Garcia $357,500 instead of taking the case to trial this week.
The district is in the middle of about a dozen more lawsuits, each at a different stage in the legal process.
“We’re working through all of them, but they’re really all unique,” new Superintendent Jason Glass said in an interview on Aug. 19.
Glass said he’s planning to fill an in-house general counsel position that’s been open since 2022. He said hiring an attorney can save money on contracted lawyers, who are incentivized to bill the district.
A general counsel can also make sure the district is following the law and its own policies by doing employee training, Glass said.
The next case to go to trial is from parents Todd and Kerry Feinberg, who said their son needed stitches and has a scar from cutting his face on a sharp edge of fiberglass on the playground at Ohlone. The trial is scheduled to start on March 8 and last five to seven days.
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