14 claimants, town of 800.... This guy molested 1.75% of the population, or 3.5% of the women/girls in town if averages hold. Jesus.

The amount set a new record for abuse cases against school districts in Oklahoma, topping a $5-million settlement reached by Kingfisher Public Schools in 2023. [...] the district paid $500,000 from the school’s general fund toward the settlement, while their liability insurance paid $1 million.

Sounds like they were under-insured. The Catholic Church got away with it by having their insurance pay everything, and then declaring bankruptcy whenever someone went against the Church's actual assets.

Wonder how many complaints were ignored before he actually got charged. Probably would have been much cheaper to act the first time, before he had dozens of victims for them to compensate.

This headline is shit. It's just a masked type of victim blaming. What actually happened is that many town employees must have known about the SA, considering there were 14+ victims and SA doesn't happen overnight, and they did nothing for quite some time... So the real story is that the town faces a huge tax hike because its employees decided to cover up SA.

If they'd caught the shady bastard after the first or second assault, the legal bills would have been millions of dollars less. But they didn't, because it wasn't a priority.

As for who knew or should have known but did nothing, we don't know, but the town residents might want to dig into that.

The former coach and alleged abuser

… then goes on to document a guilty plea and some horrific detail, I think at this point “alleged” is a bit

Small town in Oklahoma......they're probably blaming their misfortune on the people that sued.

Paying for public schools from city-level budgets and local taxes is one of the many things that I don’t think most Americans realize is weird about America. Normal countries fund their public schools from a national or regional budget so that kids from poor neighbourhoods don't get even more shafted than they already are.

Like most problems, this one is also solved by wealth redistribution from the billionaire class to regular people.

Every dollar that the local government should have had to pay that settlement is sitting in some offshore account, it makes more sense to pick a random billionaire and force them to pay out than it does to increase property taxes on people who live in their homes.

We here in Kansas City are voting today to potentially recall our county executive over massively inflated property taxes.

This seems to be happening all over the place.

I'd bet many members of this community ignored, dismissed and even helped cover up these abuses because that's what little conservative communities do: ignore and enable sexual assault because they can't admit that it's happening, and they'll sacrifice their vulnerable community members to keep up appearances for as long as possible.

He did manage to fuck just about everyone in the end...

I'm shocked that it wasn't a cop.

How does a school property tax increase just happen without it being voted on and passed by the community?

How much longer can the people be robbed by the 1% before we take a stand? We're already at a tipping point and I believe things are only going to get more violent and deadly. This is trumps America and his administration is gutting the working class. While this isn't directly related to him, the town is taking a play out of his sex scandal playbook

They need $7,500 per resident and, according to the article, they intend to raise that money over three years. I don't know what their property values are like but if I assume an average house price of $300k, a current tax rate of 2%, and three people per house then they're currently getting $6,000 in property taxes per person over three years (which they need to spend on other things) and so an enormous tax increase really is necessary.

(I'm neglecting non-residential property tax payers. A tiny town like this probably doesn't have many.)

Elect Republicans, get pedos.

At this point I’d move across county lines to somewhere nearby that won’t have double the property tax rate.

That's a really good way to put the victims in danger

This is why comprehensive, single payer public health (and education, infrastructure, police de-escalation and oversight, jobs, transportation, food, and and and) are an investment with incalculable ROI. This is why "render to Caesar."

Some coach diddles kids and the families and kids have to pay for it through insane tax hikes and less school funding? In what world does that make sense?

They already put the coach in prison for 15 years and probation for 25 years after that. Why punish the local community too? Yes, the families should be made whole, but not at the expense of objectively innocent tax payers and schoolchildren.