Cheektowaga-Sloan school district settles sex abuse lawsuit for $450,000, escapes damages in 2nd case

The Cheektowaga-Sloan Union Free School District has resolved two Child Victims Act lawsuits with relatively little cost to taxpayers – at least so far.

In one case, the district settled with a 56-year-old man who alleged being repeatedly abused by teacher Richard Meloon in the early 1980s. Two insurers paid $450,000 on behalf of the district. They also covered the cost of defending against the man’s 2021 Child Victims Act lawsuit, with the district paying no out-of-pocket funds. The district didn’t admit any wrongdoing in the case.

In the second case, a jury declined to award any monetary damages to a woman who alleged being molested by teacher Herbert C. Horni as a fourth grader, even though the jury agreed that the abuse occurred, and the district was at least partially responsible. The district has paid $136,400 to date in legal fees in that case, which the plaintiff’s attorney is appealing.

School districts sued over child sex abuse also battling in court with insurers

A Hamburg lawsuit is among dozens across the state in which insurers are at odds with school districts and nonprofit organizations over whether they are obligated to defend against and pay damages in Child Victims Act cases.

The lawsuit, filed in 2020, went to trial last fall. In its verdict, the jury agreed that the plaintiff had been sexually abused as a 10-year-old-girl at Woodrow Wilson Elementary School in the early 1970s, and it found the district negligent in not preventing the abuse. But the jury determined the district’s negligence was not a substantial factor in causing damages to the plaintiff, who is now 63 and lives in Lockport. As such, it did not award any compensation.

The woman’s attorney, Daniel J. Chiacchia, asked Judge Daniel J. Furlong to set aside the jury verdict and order a new trial, which Furlong declined to do. In July, Chiacchia appealed Furlong’s decision to the Appellate Division, Fourth Judicial Department.

The two resolved lawsuits are the only Child Victims Act cases against the Cheektowaga-Sloan district and involved teachers who are both deceased.

In the case that was settled, the man identified only as S.H. in court documents, accused Meloon of molesting him multiple times, including inside a classroom at John F. Kennedy Junior and Senior High School, where Meloon taught French and mathematics.

S.H. alleged the abuse started when he was in seventh grade in 1980, with Meloon fondling him in a car after a Buffalo Sabres game. It proceeded to Meloon paying S.H. in exchange for his visits to Meloon’s classroom, according to court papers. S.H. said those visits usually involved mutual touching of each other’s groin areas. He said he used the money to buy lunch and snacks. The abuse continued even after S.H. moved to Buffalo and left the Cheektowaga Sloan district to attend Burgard High School and after Meloon retired from the district in 1983, according to court papers.

S.H. said he didn’t reveal the abuse to anyone, but he told four teachers and a principal that Meloon regularly took him to hockey games.

Meloon’s personnel filed showed no complaints against him and “only praise” for his work as a teacher and adviser for the school newspaper, court papers said. The district’s attorneys argued the lawsuit should be dismissed because district officials had no notice of the alleged abuse of S.H. or of any alleged propensity for Meloon to abuse students.

The district’s motion to dismiss the case was still pending when a deal was reached in May, whereby two district insurers agreed to pay $450,000 to settle the claims, according to the terms of a general release.

The district provided The Buffalo News a copy of the general release in response to a Freedom of Information Law request.

Allianz Resolution Management paid $300,000 and Chubb Insurance $150,000 toward the settlement. Insurance also paid the district’s legal fees in the case.

Ken-Ton to pay $17.5 million to settle sexual abuse claims against retired teacher

The Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda School District has agreed to pay $17.5 million to settle 35 Child Victims Act lawsuits filed by former students of a retired elementary school teacher. The lawsuits accused Arthur F. Werner, a longtime social studies teacher, of groping and molesting fifth-grade boys at Herbert Hoover Elementary School – sometimes in full view of other students.

Catherine J. Fiorentino, attorney for the plaintiff, S.H., did not respond to requests for comment. District Superintendent Andrea Galenski and School Board President Denise McCowan declined to comment on the cases.

Cheektowaga-Sloan was billed $136,450 in legal fees by Bond Schoeneck & King as primary defense attorney in the case that went to trial, according to Wayne W. Drescher, the district’s business manager, who provided the tally in response to a separate FOIL request by The News.

But the district was able to escape the kind of large settlement bill that has forced some other districts in the region to borrow money. Kenmore-Tonawanda schools, for example, issued bonds to pay off a $17.5 million settlement of 35 lawsuits that accused an elementary school teacher of molesting students. Cheektowaga Maryvale Union Free School District, a neighboring district to Cheektowaga-Sloan, paid $8.4 million to settle five cases.

In the Cheektowaga-Sloan case that went to trial, a woman accused the district of failing to protect her from Horni, an elementary school teacher who she alleged sexually abused her in 1971, when she was 9 or 10 years old.

The plaintiff testified that Horni was alone with her after school when he showed her a textbook that depicted naked men and women and then molested her, according to court papers.

The plaintiff did not tell anyone about the abuse. The district later learned that three other girls in the plaintiff’s class accused Horni of molesting them.

In a meeting on Feb. 1, 1971 with Superintendent Joseph S. Gizinski and Principal Victor J. Burgio, Horni did not deny the allegations and told his superiors “he was sorry that this happened and that he was willing to do anything to make things right,” according to a sworn statement by Gizinski.

The superintendent sent a letter the same day to the state education commissioner, explaining that Horni submitted his resignation and promised to seek psychiatric help.

“Please advise me of any further action that is necessary on the part of the school district as well as action that you may be contemplating,” Gizinski wrote in the letter to Commissioner Ewald Nyquist.

In his sworn statement on March 8, 1971, Gizinski said Sloan police arrested Horni a day after their meeting.

To bolster his case that the district knew or should have known that Horni was an abuser, Chiacchia called an expert witness who testified that, even in the 1970s, there should have been notations in Horni’s personnel file of concerning classroom conduct that had been brought to the district’s attention by a sixth-grade girl and her mother.

The expert, Vincent J. Coppola, a former schools superintendent in multiple districts, also testified that Horni never should have been permitted to have one-on-one meetings with students behind closed doors.

Ruling their testimony would have been “extremely prejudicial” against the district by engendering sympathy for the plaintiff, Furlong didn’t allow Chiacchia to call as witnesses any of the three women whose complaints about Horni in 1971 led to the teacher’s resignation.

Chiacchia said in an interview with The News that he believes the appeal will be successful.

“There was one evidentiary ruling we thought was critical to the case, and we feel that we have a fairly good chance of having that ruling reversed and getting a new trial,” he said.

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