Jeff Wagonseller, the Cabrillo High School principal placed on administrative leave by the Lompoc Unified School District on Sept. 14, was accused of sexual misconduct with a 16-year-old student while a basketball coach at Bishop Gorman High School in Nevada nearly two decades ago.
Wagonseller resigned from the Catholic high school shortly after the allegations came to light. He did not face criminal prosecution because the statute of limitations on the case had passed, but the former student, Georgina Mall, did take the case to civil court seeking damages.
The case was dismissed with prejudice on Aug. 2, 2001, about one year after Wagonseller resigned from Bishop Gorman, according to court documents obtained by the Sun.
The Lompoc Unified School District did not immediately return requests seeking comment, and Wagonseller could not be reached for comment.
Teri Miller, president of SESAME, a national advocacy group that lobbies for the prevention of sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment of students by teachers and other school staff, said concerned Lompoc parents alerted her to Wagonseller getting another job in education.
“They had discovered his past, and they were very concerned their children were attending a school where a principal had previously [allegedly] engaged in sexual misconduct,” she explained.
Miller called Wagonseller’s appointment as principal at Cabrillo another example of “passing the trash,” where educators investigated, accused, or charged for abuse are able to resign and get a new job at a new school.
She said she had even used the Cabrillo principal as an example in a testimony last year to the Nevada state Legislature as they reviewed a bill that aimed to prevent such hiring. After presenting her findings, Miller was approached by parents of former Bishop Gorman students.
“They said they knew [Wagonseller], were there when [the alleged misconduct] was happening, and said he had no business working with children anywhere,” she said. “California has acquired a number of offenders from Nevada sadly and [vice versa].”
In 2004, the Department of Education conducted multiple surveys, which estimated that millions of students were subjected to sexual misconduct by school employees sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade. A December 2010 report to the U.S. Government Accountability Office said interviews with actual offenders corroborated the surveys’ statistics.
“One series of studies found that 232 child molesters admitted to molesting a total of 17,000 victims,” the report says. “In these cases, the individuals molested dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of victims, sometimes without ever being caught.”
Miller said “passing the trash” only enabled potential offenders.
“This is exactly what happened with Jeff Wagonseller and why I used him as an example in my testimony this year,” she added. “Here he is—he was accused and he was sued for engaging in sexual misconduct with a student and yet he is now a principal at a California high school.”
California law requires school employees at the time of hire to provide fingerprints, which law enforcement uses in a database to notify districts if and when that person is arrested. The state also requires that both public and private school employees undergo criminal history checks.
Wagonseller became principal at the Lompoc high school in 2014. He previously worked for the school as an administrator and before that as Lompoc Valley Middle School’s principal.
Miller said it was hard to believe that no one in the district was aware of Wagonseller’s past, especially after parents with students enrolled at Cabrillo reached out to her.
“I don’t know if Cabrillo knew when they hired him, or if the district did when they hired him after he left Nevada, or if they were made aware sometime after the fact, or if they knew of his civil suit from 2000,” she said, adding she was not certain when exactly the school district would have known. “Certainly with the amount of attention that the parents brought to the situation and their concern about Mr. Wagonseller’s past, they knew.”
This article appears in Sep 21-28, 2017.