SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Parents at a suburban Sacramento school district are fuming after they learned officials unwittingly hired an accused child molester as a physical education teacher at a local elementary school.

“I feel like the school district failed our kids,” Ryan Hiett, parent of three Beamer Park Elementary School students, told the Sacramento Bee. “Not only our district, but Sacramento (City Unified School District.)”

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The Woodland school district fired Abdol Hossein Mehrdadi June 5 after parents discovered he was accused by multiple female students at Sacramento’s John H. Still K-8 School of sexually assaulting them between 2004 and 2007. A Sacramento Superior Court awarded the victims $4 million in a civil lawsuit, but the district and Mehrdadi settled out of court for an undisclosed sum, and denied the girls were molested, according to the news site.

Mehrdadi’s name surfaces in multiple articles with a simple online search, and parents want to know how district officials in Woodland missed his questionable background when they hired him. Mehrdadi was on paid administrative leave in the Sacramento school district for four years through the legal proceedings, until he retired in 2012.

Lawyers.com summarized his case in March, 2012:

Abdol Hossein Mehrdadi, a gym teacher at the John Still Elementary School in Sacramento, groomed and molested one girl over the course of three years from 2003 to 2006, then started the process with another girl in 2007, according to a lawsuit filed in 2009. Mehrdadi, who has not been charged criminally, settled with the girl’s families for undisclosed terms, but the suit went forward against the school district for failing to protect its students.

Mehrdadi would take the girls to a small “room within a room” adjacent to the gym where there was no supervision or monitoring by the school, lawyers for the plaintiffs said. “He was allowed to basically separate children from the PE class, kind of under a ruse of cleaning a room off the gym,” says Gigi Knudtson, lead attorney for the plaintiffs. “He started with grooming one of the children in second grade, touching her over her clothes, then under her clothes, then by the time she was in fourth grade he was taking her into the room and actually started raping her.”

The second victim said she was taken to the room once in 2007 when she was in first grade, where the teacher pulled her pants down and touched her rear end. A third victim, who was not party to the lawsuit, testified that Mehrdadi had massaged her chest, telling her he was teaching her how to make her breasts harder.

Mehrdadi wasn’t deterred by the settlement. He soon went to work in Woodland schools, and substituted in nearby Elk Grove and Natomas school districts.

Because Mehrdadi wasn’t convicted of a crime, his fingerprints don’t register his alleged misdeeds during background checks, and his credential as a physical education teacher remains valid through September 2016, the Bee reports.

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Officials in all three school districts terminated Mehrdadi as soon as they realized who he was, but Woodland was slow on the uptake, and parents last week demanded to know why.

“Dozens of parents gathered last week in the stifling heat of the gymnasium at Beamer Park and demanded to know how a man accused of molesting two students in Sacramento became a physical education teacher at their school,” the news site reports.

“They arrived, many with children in tow, impatient for answers and unhappy with a school district some said betrayed their trust by hiring Mehrdadi. Many parents learned of the allegations from a Facebook post.”

The district only requested two employment references, and “that’s shocking in itself,” parent Casie Hiett told the Bee. “They should be researching more who they’re hiring.”

Parent Linda Moderow, whose fifth-grade daughter was in Mehrdadi’s class at Beamer Park, said the teacher was awful.

“My daughter would just be crying after school because of him and the way he harassed her,” Moderow told CBS Sacramento. “When he’d put his hand on her back that at one time I told him, you don’t even need to touch my kids.”

Woodland superintendent Maria Armstrong blamed the system for allowing Mehrdadi to continue teaching.

“I think we could provide more oversight in making sure that these steps and adding maybe a two-step process on reference checking,” Armstrong told CBS Sacramento.

“He shouldn’t have been able to settle and continue on in employment especially in a position where it involves children. That law needs to change,” she said. “There is nothing stopping him really from going to another school district somewhere else and this happening again.”

Woodland parents like Linda Moderow and others now plan to use Mehrdadi an example for demanding a change in state law, according to the Bee.

“Do we want to be known as this country agriculture town who had the wool pulled over their eyes and move on, or do we follow this through?” Moderow said.