Former Blossom Hill Elementary Student Wins $4.2 Million Over Teacher's Abuse and Ignored Complaints
After trial: The settlement was reached through mediation shortly before a November 7, 2022 trial date, so there was no verdict and no appeal. Payment terms were not published, and the district did not state a dollar figure itself.
Won by Cerri, Boskovich & Allard.
A former Blossom Hill Elementary student sexually abused in 2008 and 2009 by fifth-grade teacher and community youth theater director Joseph Brian Houg received $4.2 million from the Los Gatos Union School District in October 2022. The claim alleged the district ignored at least 11 complaints about Houg between 2001 and 2020. The settlement came through mediation about two weeks before a scheduled trial. A second plaintiff, abused in 2020, received a separate $900,000 award.
What happened
In October 2022, the Los Gatos Union School District agreed to pay $4.2 million to a man who was sexually abused as a child in 2008 and 2009 by Joseph Brian Houg, a fifth-grade teacher at Blossom Hill Elementary School who also directed the Los Gatos Youth Theater. The payment was part of a $5.1 million resolution reached through mediation with two former students. The other plaintiff, abused in 2020, received $900,000 in a separate award.
Houg taught fifth grade at Blossom Hill and directed the community youth theater, which gave him regular access to children outside the classroom as well. Sheriff's deputies arrested him in September 2020 after he asked two 13-year-old boys to engage in inappropriate conduct during video calls, and the district suspended him without pay. In November 2021 he was sentenced to 35 years in prison for molesting 10 former Blossom Hill students. The plaintiff in this case was one of them, and Houg's convictions included three felony counts of lewd and lascivious acts on a child by force, duress, menace or fear.
The civil case focused on what the district knew and when. Attorney Mark Boskovich, who spoke for the plaintiffs and is now a partner at Cerri, Boskovich & Allard, said his team found evidence of at least 11 complaints made to the school between 2001 and 2020. Parents had accused Houg of verbal abuse, and some of the complaints involved sexual harassment. According to Boskovich, the district did not document or investigate the early complaints, did not discipline Houg, and did not supervise him more closely. The plaintiffs' position was that administrators had enough warning over almost two decades to act and did not.
The plaintiff's lawyers said he continues to struggle with anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts as an adult. His claim was brought under California's AB 218, which extended the statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse at public institutions and gave survivors until the end of 2022 to file historic claims. Without that law, abuse that happened in 2008 and 2009 would have been long past the ordinary filing deadlines.
The case was set for trial in Santa Clara County Superior Court on November 7, 2022, and settled about two weeks before that date. The plaintiffs were represented by the San Jose firm Corsiglia McMahon & Allard. The district's superintendent, Paul Johnson, confirmed that a settlement had been reached and said the district takes these matters seriously, though he did not state a dollar figure.
After the settlement, Boskovich said it was imperative that schools understand they cannot protect teachers who are hurting children, and called on the district to hold accountable the administrators who failed to act. The Los Gatos-Saratoga Union High School District settled a separate case that year, brought by a former student abused by her track coach.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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.