Debate over the meaning of “reassignment” follows the announcement this week that federal officials have launched an investigation into Los Angeles public schools for “appearing to protect sexual predators at the expense of its students.”

The United States Department of Education (DOE) has launched a Title IX investigation into the Los Angeles Unified School District regarding how the district handles teacher misconduct, according to a statement issued by the department earlier this week.

The announcement comes in the wake of Breitbart News exclusively reporting what leading researchers call “rampant” educator sexual misconduct throughout the U.S. in the past two decades.

The Los Angeles district provides education for nearly half a million students.

The DOE stated in its announcement:

The Los Angeles Unified School District (the District) appears to be protecting sexual predators at the expense of its students. Today, in response, the U.S. Department of Education (the Department)’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) opened a directed investigation into the District for policies that appear to automatically reassign teachers accused of sexual misconduct with students, including engaging in exploitative “romantic relationships,” to another school. OCR will determine whether the District’s handling of alleged sexual harassment, including sexual assault, by District teachers, administrators, and/or staff violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX).

“It is unconscionable that the District would simply ignore Title IX’s procedural requirements to protect teachers who cause life-changing harm to their kids,” said Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights Kimberly Richey. “The Trump Administration will always fight to uphold the law, protect the safety of all students, and restore common sense to our schools.”

However, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles school officials defended their policy, which was forged with the local teacher’s union in 2024. It says “reassignment” does not necessarily mean the teacher would go to work at a different school but be removed from teaching while an investigation into misconduct is underway.

The Times reported:

The policy states that “a reassignment is defined as the provisional removal of an employee from their regularly assigned workplace for the safety of District students, staff, or the workplace (e.g., ‘temporary pull,’ ‘housing’ an employee, relocation of worksite for investigation into allegations, issuing a ‘stay-away’ notice, suspension pending dismissal).”

The DOE announcement included a document that detailed the 2024 agreement between the United Teachers Los Angeles and LAUSD.

According to the document, reassignment will only occur for transgressions that include:

• sexual harassment of a student;
• behavior with a student that is motivated by sexual interest;
• maintaining a sexual or romantic relationship with a student or other minor;
• creating, selling, or using child pornography;
• unnecessary physical contact with a student;
• and failure to report suspected child abuse.

Richey also said, “Under Title IX, schools must respond appropriately and address claims of sexual misconduct, including sexual harassment and assault, in a timely manner, but the District seems to be putting the continued employment of sexual predators above the safety of students.”

In Tuesday’s statement, officials said the new investigation “builds on the Department’s 2020 National Initiative launched in President Trump’s first term to address sexual assault in K-12 schools.”

Earlier this week, DOE Secretary Linda McMahon posted the list of “reassignment” transgressions on X and accused the Los Angeles teachers union of appearing to “protect the employment of sexual predators over the safety of students.”

“The Trump Administration will always fight to uphold the law, protect the safety of students, and restore common sense to our schools,” McMahon said.

An LAUSD spokesperson told KTLA that the DOE’s allegations are not true and that district officials take all allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment with the utmost seriousness.

As Breitbart News exclusively reported in late March, leading researchers of the persistent educator sexual misconduct epidemic in the U.S. say a number of factors have played into the dramatic rise of educator sexual misconduct seen in weekly headlines of yet another teacher accused of a sexual relationship with a student.

Charol Shakeshaft, Ph.D. has been studying the problem for four decades; she is considered the nation’s leading expert on the issue and authored a landmark 2004 study for the DOE under the Bush administration. An updated version of the study in 2022 showed a 100 percent increase in rape and attempted rape by educators.

In her 2024 book Organizational Betrayal: How Schools Enable Sexual Misconduct and How to Stop It, she writes that school cultures and institutional structures can be complicit in the proliferation of sexual misconduct.

She explained the role an offender’s perception of the district environment can play during an exclusive interview with Breitbart News.

“Mostly it’s opportunity presented by a lack of scrutiny,” she said. “And whether or not they think that they’ll get caught, whether or not they think that environment they’re in, would this be something that they would get in trouble for?”

Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets , which documents one of the worst cases of child sex abuse in U.S. history, and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.