Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of child sexual abuse that readers may find disturbing.
WEST PALM BEACH — After school administrators welcomed back to campus a teacher accused of rape , his teenage accuser sued those responsible for hiring him in the first place.
In a federal lawsuit filed last month, the girl accused the Palm Beach County School Board of inviting danger into its halls when it hired Dax Rankine, a man whose criminal record once caused the Florida Board of Education to deny his application for a teaching license.
The lawsuit revives the rape allegations that the child, now a ninth-grader, first reported to school police in 2023.
The girl said then and now that Rankine, a physical-education teacher at Sunset Palms Elementary School in suburban Boynton Beach , groomed and raped her between the second and fourth grades. She said the abuse ended in 2020, after the spread of COVID-19 forced in-person classes to end.