The Montecito Union School District soon will go to court to defend itself over alleged sexual abuse by an employee in the 1970s.

Two former students are alleging in a lawsuit that they were sexually harassed and abused by then-Principal Stanford Kerr, and that other district employees knew about the abuse and conspired to cover it up.

Kerr died in 2013 and was the superintendent/principal of Montecito Union School for 25 years until 1979. He also worked as an elementary teacher in Gaviota and Carpinteria, according to his obituary.

The lawsuit comes after a 2019 state law, Assembly Bill 218, gave people until age 40 to file claims against educators who allegedly abused or assaulted them and the administrations who failed to protect them. The legislation also opened a three-year window for people to file lawsuits for even older allegations.

The Carpinteria Union School District is facing a similar situation with former students suing the district over abuse from Virgil Williams, a former principal of Main Elementary during the 1970s.

The big difference between the two cases is that Williams had been convicted of abusing students in the 1980s, while the lawsuit against Montecito Union School is the first time that allegations have been made against Kerr.

The Montecito Union district is being sued by two men, identified in court documents only as John Doe 1 and John Doe 2, who are now in their 50s and allege that they were abused by Kerr in the late 1970s.

The case originally involved a third John Doe, who has since settled his case with the district, according to Santa Barbara County Superior Court documents.

The victims allege that at least two of Kerr’s secretaries and a teacher, identified as H.R. in court documents, knew about the abuse and harassment and successfully conspired to cover it up.

John Richards, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the case, said the abuse began against one of the victims when they got in trouble at school.

Richards said they believe that after the school’s officials learned what Kerr was doing, they had the victim’s family sign an agreement that when the student got in trouble, he would be sent home rather than go to the Kerr’s office — in an attempt to cover up the abuse.

“They stigmatized this poor guy because they didn’t want the truth to come out,” Richards said.

The court case alleges that the district failed to protect them. The plaintiffs are seeking general damages that apply to the loss of enjoyment of life, physical pain, mental suffering, emotional trauma, and anxiety, according to Richards.

“When you’ve been abused and betrayed like that, it’s hard to believe that the world is a safe place,” Richards said. “His life has all been about fight or flight.”

In a June letter to the Montecito Union School community, current Superintendent/Principal Anthony Ranii said the district did not know about the alleged abuse until the lawsuit was filed.

Ranii said the district’s legal team, Griffith and Thornburgh, is “vigorously defending this lawsuit despite the lack of evidence and the fact that few remaining former staff members are available from that era.”

Additionally, MUS is joining other school districts and public agencies seeking a “legislative fix” to the situation because districts are facing large financial losses from these cases, Ranii wrote.

MUS provided input to the Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team of California, which produced a report for the California legislature about the financial consequences districts are facing from AB 218.

“It seems deeply unfair that allegations from 1972-1976 would need to be resolved by taking away resources from students in 2025, but to date the legislature has not been willing to undertake the steps needed to protect school districts from the dire threats posed from these lawsuits,” Ranii wrote at the time.

Normally, districts are protected by liability insurance, but because the allegations are from the 1970s, Ranii explained that they haven’t been able to find the district insurance policy from that time, and the insurance company no longer exists.

That means that if a jury sides with the plaintiffs in the case, the district would have to pay any damages out of pocket.

The case is expected to go to trial Sept. 17 in Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Thomas Anderle’s courtroom.