The families of eight former students at Washington Hebrew Congregation’s preschool are suing the early childhood center, alleging that the school allowed the “prolonged and repeated” abuse of three- and four-year-old children in their care.

“Systemic, regular sexual abuse of such young children and in large numbers in an educational environment does not occur in the absence of neglect by the school administrators of their duty to operate the environment in a manner that thwarts the ability of would-be and unknown predators to access children alone, without visibility or accountability, in order to abuse them,” reads the 74-count complaint filed in Superior Court for the District of Columbia.

Washington Hebrew is a 167-year congregation in the Reform Judaism tradition, and it is located in Cathedral Heights.

The complaint centers around a teacher hired in March of 2016 to work at the preschool. Because he is not a defendant in the lawsuit and has not been criminally charged, DCist is not naming him. A D.C. police investigation into these complaints is ongoing.

“The staff member in question was put on leave immediately when we first reported these allegations to law enforcement in August,” says Amy Rotenberg, a spokesperson for Washington Hebrew Congregation. “He is not employed with us and has not been” since the summer.

However, the lawsuit alleges that Washington Hebrew’s Early Childhood Director, DJ Schneider Jensen, began receiving complaints about the teacher’s behavior as soon as a month into his employment, and that those complaints continued over a period of two years. During that time, Jensen did not investigate those complaints, nor did she restrict the teacher’s unsupervised access to children at the school, according to the complaint. The lawsuit says that some of the student’s behaviors were symptoms of possible abuse, but weren’t picked up on by staff because of a lack of training provided by the school.

The lawsuit was filed anonymously to protect the identity of the children and their families, and the plaintiffs are represented by Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll. The families are seeking damages to help manage the consequences of sexual abuse.

In a statement, Washington Hebrew Congregation said that it reported allegations of sexual abuse to law enforcement “as soon as we learned” of them, and “since that moment and for the past eight months we have continually and fully cooperated with the ongoing criminal investigation.”

“Although there has not been any arrest, these allegations are very troubling,” the statement says. “As a faith community, Washington Hebrew has supported and will continue to support its entire community as individuals grapple with how these allegations affect them and their families.”