Angry parents confronted school officials Wednesday, demanding to know why they weren’t told for a year that Berndt was suspected of photographing children in class for sexual thrills.
Berndt was removed from classwork in January 2011 and fired within the month, but only parents of children identified as victims were told by authorities at that time of the investigation.
School officials and investigators said proper procedures were followed to prevent anything that might harm efforts to investigate and build a case against the teacher.
“That’s cool and fine but the detectives’ children don’t go here,’’ said Cheremoya Dupree, 38, whose two children attend the school and were not victims. “I want them to tell the truth … because I don’t think we got that.’’
Miramonte Principal Martin Sandoval told reporters that he followed proper district procedure.
Meanwhile, two women who said they were former students of Berndt told the Los Angeles Times ( http://lat.ms/yo4M8P) Wednesday that complaints were made about Berndt’s odd behavior as far back as 1990.
Marlene Trujillo, 30, said she and two other fourth-grade classmates spoke with a school counselor about Berndt. They told the counselor he often moved his hands under his desk, near his lap, at the front of the classroom. She and other students also had seen a jar of Vaseline in one of his desk compartments.
Trujillo said the counselor “just told us it’s not very good to make stories up. She said it was our imagination. It was never talked about again.’’
Trujillo’s classmate, Nadine Martinez Rodriguez, said she also noticed Berndt’s behavior. Martinez said she told her mother about it at the time but that her mother didn’t take it seriously enough to report to school officials, the Times reported.
School officials tried to determine how the alleged behavior went on unsuspected for so long.
“How do I make sense out of the fact that this took place over a number of years and no one seemed to know about that?’’ Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. John Deasy told the Times. “I’m definitely trying to understand how someone could not have known.’’
