EDITORIAL CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE DISTRICT OFFICIALS FAILED PUBLIC IN SCHOOL SEX SCANDAL.

FOR officials at the Los Angeles Unified School District, Thursday's arrest of a dean, Alan Hubbard -- for allegedly concealing an assistant principal's affair with a teenage student -- must have come as quite an embarrassment.

Not only did the arrest expose, yet again, how badly the district handled the case of former Assistant Principal Steve Thomas Rooney, but it came in the wake of Superintendent David L. Brewer's decision -- only days earlier -- to reinstate two of the bureaucrats who had assigned Rooney to another LAUSD campus, where he allegedly abused again.

So while Rooney and Hubbard are getting their taste of justice, their enablers within the district's higher echelons are getting off scot-free.

It's an old story in the LAUSD, where failure seldom brings consequences -- and why failure in the district is so common.

The details of the Rooney scandal are horrific: While working at Foshay Learning Center, Rooney allegedly had an ongoing, sexual affair with a 15-year-old student. At one point, he had a run-in with -- and waved a gun at -- the girl's father.

That's when the police got involved, informing the district about the gun charges and the affair. In an internal memo, numerous top district officials -- including Brewer -- were made aware of the charges, and Rooney was reassigned to a nonschool job.

But when the girl, possibly under pressure from Hubbard, recanted her story, prosecutors dropped the case.

District policy, however, requires that all such allegations be thoroughly investigated, even if there are no criminal charges. This policy was the result of past, unchecked abuses, and it's designed to keep students safe. Under the policy, the district should have thoroughly investigated Rooney -- but it didn't.

Worse yet, the LAUSD re-assigned Rooney to Markham Middle School in Watts, where he allegedly molested two more students.

When news of the scandal broke, Brewer apologized, and launched an investigation into what went wrong. The outcome of that investigation, essentially, was that the problem was primarily a communication breakdown.

"A policy and a system we have in place failed," is how Brewer has put it -- placing the blame only on faceless processes, never on actual human beings, let alone himself.

The district even went so far as to try to pin some of the blame on the police, which notified some LAUSD officials, but, apparently, not enough of them -- as though it were the LAPD's fault that L.A. Unified bureaucrats don't speak to each other.

But the problem here is much more than a mere matter of process. The LAUSD's policy was clear, as was its moral obligation to protect its students. Key people simply failed to do their job, with tragic results. They ought to be held responsible for this failure.

Yet instead of accountability, late on June 6 -- a Friday -- Brewer issued a press release announcing that two bureaucrats who oversaw Rooney, and had been briefly removed from their jobs, would return to work "as quickly as possible."

The press release -- conveniently timed for the weekend news lull -- didn't name the bureaucrats. But by all indications, they were Scott Braxton and his superior, Carol Truscott, who oversaw the last three schools where Rooney worked -- and was included in the initial memo describing the allegations against him.

Sadly, it's a safe bet that if the people most closely connected to Rooney's reassignment aren't being held responsible, then no one else will be, either.

Taxpayers, of course, will pay a price, as lawsuits and pricey settlements are inevitable. Students -- those we know about and those we don't -- have paid a more terrible price still. But the people responsible for protecting those students, from the superintendent all the way down, will wash their hands of this mess.

Yes, the system has failed us, but so have the people who are supposed to be running the system. And until they are held accountable for their unconscionable negligence, we have little reason to expect anything but more of the same.