$6 Million Settlement for Former Student Abused by Teacher at Del Paso Heights Elementary
After trial: The district settled before trial, and terms beyond the $6 million figure, including how it will be funded, were not reported. A separate lawsuit by another former student against the district over the same teacher was still pending in August 2025.
Won by Cerri, Boskovich & Allard.
Twin Rivers Unified School District agreed in August 2025 to pay $6 million to a former Del Paso Heights Elementary student who said a teacher sexually abused her when she was a sixth grader. Her suit, filed in early 2023, alleged the district failed to properly screen and supervise the teacher. He pleaded guilty in February 2025 to nine counts of lewd acts upon a child and was sentenced to 215 years to life. Lauren Cerri represented the former student.
What happened
In August 2025, Twin Rivers Unified School District in Sacramento County agreed to pay $6 million to a woman who was sexually abused as an 11-year-old sixth grader at Del Paso Heights Elementary School. Her identity has not been made public, and she is identified in court papers as Jane Doe. The Sacramento Bee reported the settlement on August 13, 2025, and EdSource followed two days later.
The suit, filed in Sacramento Superior Court in early 2023, centered on Kim Kenneth Wilson, a longtime teacher at the school who served as faculty adviser to its broadcasting club. Club students, including the girl, had access to a locked, soundproof room on campus, and the complaint said Wilson groomed her and abused her there during the school year.
The claim against the district rested on screening and supervision. The lawsuit said the abuse all took place on school grounds while both Wilson and the student were supposed to be supervised by the district, and that the district failed in its legal duty to properly screen and supervise him. Reporting on the case also showed that the district's own police department had received a report in 2019 alleging that Wilson engaged in lewd conduct with a minor years earlier.
Lauren Cerri, of the firm now named Cerri, Boskovich & Allard, represented the former student. Speaking to the Bee, she said there is a repeated pattern of schools putting their image and reputations over the safety of students, and that preventing grooming prevents abuse.
The criminal case ran separately. Sacramento police arrested Wilson in January 2023, and investigators later found recordings of abuse at his home. He was charged with dozens of counts of lewd and lascivious acts on children under 14 and pleaded guilty in February 2025 to nine counts of lewd acts upon a child, admitting allegations of multiple victims and abuse of a position of trust. On August 22, 2025, Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Satnam Rattu sentenced him to 215 years to life in prison. Prosecutors told the Bee that, with time served, he could be eligible for parole as early as 2042 under the state's elder parole program.
A second civil suit against the district, filed in June 2023 by another former student who says Wilson abused her when she was 7 and in second grade, was still pending in Sacramento County Superior Court when the settlement was reported and is not part of this result.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.The Sacramento Bee, Twin Rivers Unified $6 million settlement over former teacher Kim Wilson, Aug. 13, 2025·Archived copy
- 2.EdSource, 'Twin Rivers Unified settles sex abuse suit for $6M as teacher faces prison time', Aug. 15, 2025·Archived copy
- 3.Sacramento County District Attorney, 'Former Elementary School Teacher Sentenced for Child Sexual Assault', Aug. 22, 2025·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Cerri, Boskovich & Allard
All Cerri, Boskovich & Allard proven verdicts →A Santa Clara County jury awarded $65 million to one of two plaintiffs, $102.5 million in total, against Union School District after finding it failed for years to act on repeated warnings about music teacher Samuel Neipp's sexual abuse of students at Dartmouth Middle School.
A Monterey County jury returned an $18.7 million verdict against Caltrans and a trucking company after finding the state had ignored three decades of its own data showing that the left-turn configuration on Highway 156 made the road one of California's most dangerous corridors.
Evergreen School District paid $15 million to four families whose second-grade daughters were sexually molested by teacher Craig Chandler at O.B. Whaley Elementary School in San Jose.
An Alameda County jury returned a $13.7 million verdict for the families of three San Jose workers whose Honda was struck head-on by a commercial truck after two other big rigs set off a chain-reaction crash inside a dense tule fog bank on State Route 152 in November 2012.
Related sexual abuse verdicts
A Riverside County jury awarded $2.28 billion on April 25, 2023, to a woman identified as Jane Doe who was sexually abused by her stepfather from age 5 until she was 14, at the family's Lake Elsinore home and at events and property of the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The stepfather, who had pleaded guilty in 1997 to lewd acts with a child under 14 and served three years in state prison, admitted the abuse at deposition, then skipped the first day of jury selection and withdrew his answer rather than face a bench warrant. The church settled for $1 million and the mother for $200,000 before trial. The verdict, $836 million in compensatory damages and $1.44 billion in punitive damages after three days of deliberation, is one of the largest ever returned for a single survivor of childhood sexual abuse.
A Rio Arriba County jury held Acadia Healthcare and its New Mexico foster care subsidiaries responsible for placing an 8-year-old girl with a foster father who raped her repeatedly, returning one of the largest single-plaintiff sexual abuse verdicts in the country.
A St. Charles County judge entered a $300 million bench-trial judgment for a child, identified only as G.T., who was physically and sexually abused between the ages of three and five while in the care of Susan and James McLaurie, though one defendant died before the suit was filed and the only known insurance was a $303,000 policy.
A St. Charles County jury awarded $247.3 million to six women sexually assaulted by an unlicensed massage therapist at Oasis Foot Spa & Massage in St. Peters, finding the spa and its owner liable for hiring him without any background check and ignoring an early complaint. The Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment in full in 2024.