Clarification to discrimination complaint

A recent blog item about a discrimination lawsuit filed by Michael Hopwood against the Los Angeles Unified School District quoted from two versions of legal documents. Both documents are part of the public record, but the more recent one was filed to offer a cleaner, more strictly accurate version of events than the original.

One detail, in particular, was dropped from the later version. Hopwood's lawsuit no longer claims that local district Supt. Carol Truscott justified returning a suspected child molester from a desk job to a school site by saying that she didn't want a "non-productive" administrator.

The suit still accuses Truscott of transferring the employee to a campus even though Hopwood allegedly objected because of the molestation-related investigation.

Hopwood works as an operations coordinator for L.A. Unified.

The employee in question, Steve Thomas Rooney, was later arrested and currently faces molestation-related charges involving four students. He had denied wrongdoing.

For her part, Truscott also has denied wrongdoing and stated she would never knowingly do anything that would endanger children.

-- Howard Blume