A Chicago Public Schools teacher continued to sexually abuse children for months after he was removed from a Northwest Side elementary school during an investigation, a lawsuit says.
CPS alerted parents in May 2021 that they had removed Andrew Castro from Federico Garcia Lorca Elementary after an allegation of sex abuse. But the school’s letter didn’t name him, so parents of three abused children were unaware that Castro, who had befriended the families, was a threat, lawyers say.
He targeted the boys because their parents were immigrants who spoke little English, lawyers say.
CPS “didn’t do enough to warn the parents that this individual was a threat,” and the abuse continued into 2022, Cass Casper, one of the lawyers representing the three children, said at a news conference Tuesday.
“That is a failure in the notification system to parents about threats posed by employees,” Cass said.
Castro, 37, taught gym at the Avondale school for years. In June, he was criminally charged with sexual assault and sexual exploitation of a child.
The civil suit was filed in federal court in October against the Chicago Board of Education on behalf of the boys, who were 10, 11 and 12 when the alleged abuse began in 2018.
The board has asked a judge to pause the civil suit until the conclusion of the criminal case. But the boys’ lawyers want the lawsuit to continue so they can determine how seriously CPS took complaints made against the teacher that they claim initially went nowhere.
Lawyers said the school received at least four complaints against Castro by May of 2021, when the school sent a letter to parents.
Asked for comment, CPS said it does not comment on pending lawsuits and provided a copy of the May 2021 letter.
Castro, who remains held at Cook County Jail on the criminal charges, targeted the children because they came from vulnerable immigrant families, lawyers said. Two of the boys are brothers; the other is a cousin.
“He became aware that this was an underprivileged family — a family who cannot necessarily speak English well, a family that is in need — and he took advantage of that,” Casper said.
Castro allegedly began texting the boys and buying them gifts, according to the lawsuit. This allegedly continued from 2018 to 2022.
“He would take them out to a bowling alley; he would take them out to movies,” Cass said. He then allegedly met the children’s families and offered to do work on their house. “He built himself as like a friend of the family,” he said.
The teacher eventually invited the children over to his home, where the abuse happened, lawyers said. He played games with the kids in which the children would have to remove their clothes if they lost, Cass said. He allegedly raped one of the boys.
The parents did not learn of the abuse until May 2023, when they found out one of the boys was harming himself and he confided in them, the lawsuit states.
Cass and other lawyers representing the children, including Bob Fioretti and Patrycja Karlin, said CPS should have taken the complaints against the teacher more seriously and suspended him earlier.
Since CPS changed the way it handles sex abuse allegations in 2018, more than 2,000 complaints have been filed with the school district’s Office of the Inspector General, the lawyers said. Of those, 135 cases were found to have substantiated sexual misconduct, they said.
