LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – The Clark County School District has agreed to pay out millions to settle two high profile cases involving CCSD employees harming students. One, a school bus driver accused of molesting special needs students. The other, a CCSDPD officer caught on video slamming a Durango High School student onto the ground. Thursday night, the district has agreed to pay nearly $11 million dollars approving settlements for the families.
CCSD will pay $9.6 million dollars to the family of two young children molested by a CCSD bus driver on their way to and from pre-school and $1 million dollars to Durango High School students involved in a confrontation with a district police officer outside their school.
“He had visible bruising and scrapes around his neck,” the mom of an autistic student who regularly rode a special needs bus in the 90s told FOX5. She spoke to FOX5 on the condition of anonymity back in 2015. She says she will never know exactly what happened to her son.
“My son who could barely articulate things…my son said Mike did it… My husband said who’s Mike and my son said the bus driver,” the woman recounted. Back in 2015, following the arrest of bus driver Michael Banco for molesting a four and five year old the mom told FOX5 it never should have happened. She had settled with the district years earlier for $7,500 dollars plus attorney fees for the abuse her son endured yet Banco remained employed.
“I am heartsick…for those parents because those are things that have been taken from them they will never get back. Their child’s innocence is gone,” the mom cried. The district previously settled two similar lawsuits involving the bus driver at a cost of $18 million. Banco is serving 35 year to life in prison.
In the other case, widely seen cell phone video taken on February 9, 2023, by a student shows a CCSD officer slamming another student to the ground outside Durango High School. A second student was handcuffed after police say they responded to reports of a gun. No gun was found.
“He said come here you jaywalked across the street,” that is what Durango student Deon Wallace told FOX5 back about what sparked the incident outside his school. Wallace and his friend Jacory Taylor say they were handcuffed and when a third friend tried to record video on his phone, the officer tried to stop him.
“The cop grabbed him by his neck, threw him on the floor, put his knee, put him in cuffs,” Taylor recounted. The boys sought legal representation from the ACLU.
“These students were targeted by an officer who didn’t want to see them pull their cell phone out and record an abusive interaction,” argued Athar Haseebullah, Executive Director of ACLU of Nevada. After CCSD completed its investigation, no officer was disciplined and the district refused to release the body camera video. The ACLU sued and won obtaining video showing the officers vantage point during that encounter.
After the settlement was approved Thursday night, the ACLU shared the following statement:
ACLU of Nevada Legal Director Chris Peterson said:
“CCSD has spent the last two years working to avoid accountability for attacking our clients. The district hoped if it could bury the records and tie our innocent clients to a criminal narrative, that this incident would just go away. We’ve spent nearly two years seeking justice for our clients, their families, and the wider community, and we hope tonight’s settlement will help our clients and their families on their way to healing and peace.”
ACLU of Nevada Executive Director Athar Haseebullah said:
“From the inception of this matter, we have sounded the alarm about CCSD’s antics here. Two years and dozens of motions and hearings later, we’ve firmly established that CCSD’s original narrative in this matter was a bold-faced lie and that its attempt to hide records was done intentionally to hide the egregious misconduct of its own police department from the public. If CCSD continues to engage in misconduct, we will continue to sue them. We want to thank our friends at Claggett and Sykes for their support in helping secure this outcome.”
These two settlements come as the district is already dealing with a multimillion-dollar deficit blamed on unanticipated expenses including litigation FOX5 filed Freedom of Information Act request to find out exactly how much it has paid out over the last two years in settlements. The answer: the district approximates nearly $28 million. FOX5’s public records requests also revealed as of last month, the district is still facing approximately 117 more lawsuits.
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