Parents congregate outside Miramonte Elementary school.

School officials organized a town hall meeting early this morning to talk to parents about the investigation and arrest of former teacher Mark Berndt, who faces 23 felony counts of lewd acts with a child and is currently held on $23 million bail – $1 million for each criminal count. He’s due back in court on February 21st to enter his plea to the charges.

Ninety-seven percent of Miramonte Elementary’s student body is Latino. Most parents are only Spanish-language speakers, so school officials brought in Spanish-language teachers, advisors and investigators to address their concerns.

According to school principal Martín Sandoval, the purpose of the meeting was to give parents the opportunity to talk to sheriff’s investigators, to encourage them to talk to their children about what happened and have them come forward if they experienced any inappropriate contact with the teacher.

Miramonte Elementary principal Martín Sandoval talks to reporters.

“We have a crisis team on school grounds and we’ve informed teachers on how they must deal with and help students who are upset,” says Sandoval, who joined the school in 2008.

Parents are furious that they only learned about the criminal investigation of the teacher a year after he was removed from the classroom.
“When investigators showed us the pictures demonstrating contact unbecoming of a teacher, we immediately pulled him out of the classroom,” explains the school principal. “As an administrator, I had to cooperate with the authorities and not interfere with the investigation. But we did contact parents of students in his classroom.”

Investigators were at the school throughout the day to answer parents’ questions about the investigation and possibly record any complaints from other potential victims.

Lt. Carlos Marquez, from the LA Sheriff’s Department says the investigation took as long as it did because it was a difficult case. “We had to work on identifying the children. Once we started talking to them, at first the kids said they thought they were playing a game with the teacher. They didn’t realize what he was doing was wrong. We also had to get his DNA and get the lab results. Contrary to what you see on those TV shows, it takes months to get DNA results.”

Lt. Marquez from the LA Sheriff’s Special Victims Unit speaks with other investigators at Miramonte Elementary.

Lt. Marquez says they didn’t make the investigation public because it was important to prevent any cross-contamination. They wanted to make sure students didn’t share details with each other which may have tainted the case.

So far, 26 children in about 300 photographs have been identified. Of those, only 23 have been determined to be actual victims. Ten other children have yet to be identified.

The lewd acts committed against the children in the photographs appear to have taken place between 2008 and 2010. But Berndt had been teaching at the school for 30 years. Lt. Marquez recognizes there is a possibility more children have been victimized in previous years. “Since news broke about Berndt, our phone has been ringing non-stop. We’ve gotten numerous calls from students of his from past years saying that they have information regarding a case.”

He points out that in some instances there could be a statute of limitations, depending on how long ago they took place. However, “because of the severity of the case, the statute can go back more than 10 years. Even if we can’t file a charge, the testimony can help the case,” states Lt. Marquez.

Mark Berndt, 61, a teacher at Miramonte Elementary for 30 years, is in jail on $23 million bail.

Not all the children depicted in the photos were his students, but they all attended the school. Dalia Gutierrez showed up at Miramonte this morning extremely upset. She claims her 10 year-old daughter Nancy, who now attends a different school, was not one of Berndt’s students, but she was one of his innocent victims.

“I’m so angry,” she exclaims. “How could he have done this to our children and nobody know about it? Yesterday, my daughter saw his picture in the news and she came to ask me why they were arresting the teacher, because he was a nice man. She told me he would offer her ice cream and cookies.”

Gutierrez says she came to the school this morning to report what happened to the authorities.

Her daughter Nancy says the teacher invited her three times to his classroom. “He was nice. When we used to see a movie, he gave me ice cream.” The child claims that on one occasion, he gave her a cookie with some “white stuff on it” that he took from a cabinet and that it didn’t taste good.

Berndt was caught because a film processor saw the photos and turned them over to authorities. Lt. Marquez admits it would have taken much longer to uncover the truth if the teacher would have used a digital camera to record his interaction with the children.

Investigators are trying to determine if any photos are stored in Berndt’s school laptop or if he shared any images. That computer is currently in a forensic lab.