Newburgh schools will pay $11M to settle sex abuse claims by two former students
It was a shocking set of allegations, with a shocking response right on its heels.
In a lawsuit filed in 2019, a woman alleged that decades earlier when she was a Newburgh elementary school student, her gym teacher — a popular figure who had coached Newburgh's football, wrestling and track teams — had sexually abused her inside the school in heinous ways, multiple times over a period of years.
The former teacher, by then 74 years old and long since retired, was served with the court papers at his Goshen home, and denied the allegations when a reporter called about them. Three days after the story broke, Sherman Memmelaar left a note proclaiming his innocence and shot himself.
Four years later, a long quest for justice ended with Newburgh School District quietly settling with Memmelaar's accuser and another former student with similar claims against him for $11 million, a giant sum among the flood of ongoing lawsuits brought in New York under the 2019 Child Victims Act.
In a confidential deal signed last September and recently released to the USA Today Network through a public-records request, Newburgh School District agreed to pay Memmelaar's initial accuser, Sandra Burke, $8.25 million. That appears to be among the largest publicly known settlements any district in New York has paid to a single plaintiff as allegations of past abuse continue to wend their way through the court system.
Evan Foulke, the Goshen attorney who brought the lawsuits by Burke and fellow accuser Alicia Kirby, said in an interview this week that the large payments by the district don't erase the lifelong harm they suffered, calling it only "partial justice" for them.
"Sandi will always be an abused child that was willing to speak up for herself as an adult — and Alicia," he said.
A deluge of lawsuits
The two cases, filed in state Supreme Court in Orange County, were among almost 11,000 lawsuits brought over two years in New York by people alleging they had been sexually abused as children. They were enabled by a 2019 state law that temporarily lifted the statute of limitations and allowed victims to sue their abusers and the institutions that employed them, however long ago the abuse occurred.
More than half of the cases were filed against religious institutions, the largest target by far. A smaller share — about 13% — were brought against private or public schools, according to research by the Philadelphia-based advocacy group CHILD USA.
Many cases have languished in court for years. The outcomes most often reported in media accounts are those involving public school districts, which are subject to public-record requests and legally bound to approve settlements at open meetings.
The Yonkers City Council, for example, in November approved $2 million in total payments to four former Yonkers students who alleged they were sexually abused by two teachers in the 1970s and 1980s. The highest amount was $600,000 for one of the plaintiffs.
Other payments have exceeded that. A Monroe County school district paid a plaintiff $1.75 million last year. Later, an Erie County school district agreed to pay $8.4 million to settle five lawsuits involving a former art teacher, with $3.5 million going to one of the accusers.
First case: Lawsuit claims ex-Newburgh teacher sexually abused student
The Newburgh settlement
In a settlement signed Sept. 11 by the two plaintiffs and on Sept. 26 by the Newburgh School Board president, the district agreed to pay Burke $8.25 million and Kirby $2.75 million. Kirby had come forward in 2020, several months after Burke. Both alleged that Memmelaar abused them in the 1970s.
Under the terms, the district was supposed to have paid $8 million of the $11 million total by the end of 2023. Then it must make $1 million payments on June 30 of each of the next three years to complete the agreement by the middle of 2026.
The parties were obliged to keep the agreement confidential "to the maximum extent" allowed by state law.
The district is shouldering the payments on its own, without contributions from an insurance carrier. Officials told the USA Today Network in an emailed statement on Tuesday that it will draw the funds from a budget reserve account for legal liabilities and from its unassigned fund balance, meaning its surplus.
Ellenville cases: Ellenville School District faces seven lawsuits for alleged sexual abuse by former teacher
A $20 million settlement offer
Memmelaar's colleagues at Union Grove Elementary knew "Sherm" was behaving inappropriately with young girls, attorneys for Burke and Kirby argued in their quest to hold the district responsible.
"The teachers themselves at Union Grove saw that Memmelaar regularly gave little girlsmassages," Foulke wrote in a May 2023 letter to the district. "They saw that he regularly had the girls massage him. The teachers of Union Grove watched as Memmelaar regularly 'borrowed' girls out of their classes and kept these girls after gym class.
"The teachers of Union Grove all saw this and knew this, and they did nothing. Instead, they joked about it: 'Oh, there goes Sherm, getting his massage.'"
Then Foulke described in graphic terms what "Sherm" allegedly did to his clients outside of others' view, including oral sex with girls who were just 7 and 9 years old.
Both suffered permanent, catastrophic psychological damage as a result, Foulke said.
"Sandi and Alicia became destroyed," he wrote. "They did not learn how to trust. They learned both to never trust themselves or others, and also to sometimes blindly trust people who actively harm them. They had the prospect of healthy loving relationships taken away. They had the hope of a fulfilling life taken away."
In his letter, one entry in a long trail of court documents left over four years of litigation, Foulke proposed a settlement to avoid a trial: $20 million in total, with $12 million for Burke and $8 million for Kirby.
The offer expired a month later, unaccepted by the district. By September, the two sides were ready for trial and spent three full days picking a jury, weeding out candidates too strongly moved by the topic to be objective jurors.
And then, on the day that opening arguments were set to begin, the district's lawyers agreed to settle.
Chris McKenna covers government and politics for The Journal News and USA Today Network. Reach him at cmckenna@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Newburgh NY schools pay to settle Sherman Memmelaar sex abuse claims
