With five days left in California's legislative session, the coalition of school districts and public agencies pushing to cap payouts in childhood sexual abuse lawsuits has held press conferences, published survey data and named dollar figures down to the per-student cent. What it does not have, as of this week, is a bill.

The fight is over AB 218, the 2019 law that lifted the statute of limitations for suing over childhood sexual abuse and exposed public agencies — school districts most of all — to hundreds of millions of dollars in claims. For the second straight year, a well-organized push to rein in that liability looks headed for collapse not on the floor but in silence: two people told EdSource it's unlikely any reform passes this year, and no measure had been introduced as the Aug. 31 adjournment deadline closed in. The real negotiating is happening inside a working group Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas convened out of public view — the very opacity survivors' advocates flagged months ago.

The public agencies have run the louder campaign. On Aug. 20, the California School Boards Association gathered a coalition of allied groups — joint-powers insurance authorities, school administrators, district business officers and rural county governments — for a virtual press briefing (external source, opens in a new tab) that made the case in unusually granular fiscal terms.

The figures they brought were district-level and specific. Huntington Beach City School District says its abuse-related insurance costs climbed from about $80 per student before the law to $314 last year, a 420 percent increase, according to assistant superintendent Gary Stine. Poway Unified has had to steer an extra $2.5 million into its self-insurance fund over four years, associate superintendent Eric Dill said, some of it for allegations reaching back to the 1970s — decades for which the district can no longer even find proof of what insurance it once carried. A 2024 survey by the joint-powers group CAJPA, covering roughly 300 districts, reported that payouts tripled between 2018-19 and 2023-24 and forecast another doubling by 2026-27.

What the coalition wants is a tort-reform package: ceilings on damages against public entities, a "proportional liability" rule that would bill taxpayers only for the share of harm actually traceable to the agency, and tougher evidentiary hurdles for claims so old that records and witnesses have disappeared. CSBA President Debra Schade cast it not as survivors versus students but as a balance the state can strike, warning that a district driven into insolvency helps no child.

Survivors' advocates read "caps" very differently. On Thursday they rallied at the Capitol against what one called an attempt to "slam the courthouse door" on victims — Chantel Johnson of the San Francisco-based Youth Law Center, in a statement reported by EdSource (external source, opens in a new tab). Rivas, D-Hollister, has signaled he is open to limiting what victims can collect — an idea plaintiffs' lawyers reject outright.

Their sharper complaint is about process. In a February CalMatters commentary (external source, opens in a new tab), plaintiff attorney John Manly wrote that the speaker had handed a group of lawmakers the job of finding "the right balance" on abuse liability, and was doing it behind closed doors. Manly rejects the fiscal-emergency framing altogether, citing the state's Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, which found only four districts in serious distress, and argues the real strain on school budgets is falling enrollment, not abuse settlements.

None of this is happening for the first time. In that same commentary, Manly recounted that last year's effort yielded two measures — Sen. John Laird's SB 577 and Sen. Ben Allen's SB 832 — and that neither reached a floor vote. Survivors mounted what he described as an overwhelming backlash. That record is what makes this week's quiet telling: a reform whose own backers cannot get it into print with the session ending Monday is one dying by attrition rather than by an up-or-down vote.

For Bay Area districts the exposure is real whichever way Sacramento breaks. The law's lookback window has already generated statewide settlements in the hundreds of millions, and the insurers public agencies depend on have been retreating from the market for years. Pass nothing, and districts keep self-funding against half-century-old claims; pass caps in the final hours, and survivors say the door to compensation narrows. Either outcome is on track to be settled in a room the public was never invited into.