A new civil complaint says a Catholic grade school principal in Wisconsin learned about a teacher's abuse of a student in 2013 and never told police, the family, or even the next school where he went to work. Here is what the case means if a school or church failed to act on a warning about someone in your life.
Reviewed by Abuse Justice Center · Updated 2026-10-28
A gap of years between an internal report and any outside action is a recurring pattern attorneys look for when evaluating school and church abuse claims.
According to the civil complaint, a young girl was sexually abused by her fourth grade teacher during one-on-one tutoring sessions at a Wisconsin parish school beginning in 2013. The lawsuit says the school's principal became aware of the abuse at the time but never reported it to police, never told the girl's parents, and never flagged it to administrators at the school across town where the same teacher went to work a short time later.
The complaint describes a pattern that shows up again and again in institutional abuse cases: an adult in a position of trust is quietly moved along, or simply allowed to keep working, rather than reported. Court records from the teacher's later criminal case show he went on to abuse additional children at that second school before he was finally arrested, tried, and convicted on multiple counts involving several victims across both campuses.
One detail in the complaint stands out to attorneys who handle these cases: the lawsuit does not just accuse the first school of failing one child. It argues the silence let the same person keep working with kids somewhere new, where he was not yet under any suspicion.
That is the legal theory behind naming both the school and the archdiocese, not just the individual accused of abuse. When an institution has information about a risk to children and does not act on it, and more children are harmed afterward at the same or a different location, survivors from either school may have a claim against the institutions that stayed quiet, not only against the person who abused them.
Piecing together court records and the new complaint, the gap between the first internal report and any outside action stretched across several years, spanning two schools and multiple victims before the criminal system got involved.
You do not need proof that anyone deliberately conspired to hide abuse for a civil claim to exist. Under most state laws, an institution can be held liable for negligence if a supervisor knew or reasonably should have known about misconduct and failed to act, separate from whatever a criminal court eventually decides about the person who committed the abuse.
That distinction matters for families who assume there is nothing to do unless there was a police report or a conviction at the time. A supervisor choosing silence over a phone call to authorities can itself be the basis for a claim against the school, parish, or diocese that employed them.
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Often, yes. Civil claims against an institution focus on what the school, parish, or program knew and failed to do, which is a separate legal question from whether a criminal case was ever filed for your specific incident.
Many states have changed their deadlines for childhood sexual abuse claims, including temporary windows that let people file cases that would otherwise be too old. A free case review can tell you what applies where you live.
No. You do not need to have been part of any existing case, or even attend the same school named in the news, to have your own situation evaluated.
No. Case evaluations are free and confidential, and attorneys in matters like this typically work on contingency, meaning there is no fee unless they recover money for you.