A private company that operates an Atlanta alternative school where teachers were recently accused of brutalizing troublemakers has employed staff members at two other schools who faced criminal charges involving students or teenagers.

Community Education Partners, the Nashville-based company facing suit in Fulton County Superior Court, runs 17 alternative schools nationwide. A former teacher at a CEP school in Pennsylvania faces a felony sexual assault charge involving a teenage girl, and a former teacher's aide at a CEP school in Florida is scheduled to go on trial this month on a misdemeanor battery charge involving misbehaving students.

Randle Richardson, chief executive officer of CEP, said he took disciplinary action against both staff members immediately after charges were brought against them.

Richardson also noted that the sexual assault charge didn't involve a CEP student and said the teacher and the aide were respected by their peers. He contended his company adequately screens and trains employees who work in a stressful and often explosive atmosphere.

The criminal charges, however, didn't surprise Emily Chiang, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who filed the lawsuit in Fulton County. The suit said there are fights involving students, teachers, staff, police and security forces at Forrest Hill Academy, the school for trouble-making and failing teens that CEP runs for the Atlanta school board.

"There is a pattern of violence at the school," she said. "It's not just isolated incidents. It happens repeatedly, and nobody has done anything about it."

Richardson denied the suit's allegations and said his staff is trained to defuse violent situations in schools where confrontation is a daily issue. Teachers and staff work in teams to safely remove combative students when necessary and are disciplined for even verbal attacks on students, he said.

"It happens every day in every learning center that we operate that some kid is [removed by staff] but, that being said, our staff is taught de-escalation," Richardson said in a phone interview from his Nashville headquarters. "We've had several knuckleheads who would say something to a student, and they would be disciplined."

He said an otherwise dedicated teaching aide crossed the line in Florida when he used older students to discipline misbehaving ones. In the Pennsylvania case, Richardson said, school authorities believed they were legally blocked at first from taking any action against the teacher.

In that case, school authorities discovered during an annual background check last year that Arnesx Honore, an eight-grade math teacher at the school in Philadelphia, had been charged with rape, terrorist threats and multiple other charges, Richardson said.

But the school allowed Honore, who had worked there for three years, to continue teaching because the prosecutor dropped the charges and the girl was not a student in the school, Richardson said.

In February, administrators learned that prosecutors had refiled charges a month after dropping them and that Honore had made the city's "Most Wanted List." The school fired him, Richardson said.

Before that, school authorities never confronted him, investigated the charge in depth or sought to remove him. Honore's union contract blocked action against him in a criminal case involving a dropped charge that did not involve the school, Richardson said. "If the charge has been dismissed, it is like it never happened," said Richardson, who said CEP lawyers are developing better oversight policies of staff off school grounds. "If you asked people who worked with him, they would say he was an excellent math teacher. "

Honore's charges now include statutory sexual assault, terrorist threats and corruption of a minor, according to court records. A judge dismissed the rape charge.

Asked if he thought the school had an obligation to investigate the charges further, Richardson demurred.

"He is obviously not an individual you would want teaching for you," he said. "But the same folks who are saying we are violating the rights of these kids would probably say we are violating the rights of that individual if we took action against him after the charge had been dismissed."

In the Florida case, a former CEP teaching aide is scheduled to go on trial April 29 on charges of battery and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He is accused of using upperclassmen to intimidate misbehaving students.

The aide, Bryant Alexander, brought two older teens into a classroom of 14- and 15-year-olds in Pinellas Park after the class' profanity had driven its teacher to tears, said Alexander's attorney, Denis deVlaming.

Alexander only wanted the students to lecture the class, but one began pushing, slapping and humiliating the students, deVlaming said.

"Nobody hurt, nobody bruised," he said. "He [Alexander] did not intervene to stop them. He did not encourage it, either."

Alexander was forced to resign for breaking the school rule against using students to discipline, Richardson said. The principal also was forced to quit.

"It is one thing to let students mentor other students, but you don't let students discipline other kids," Richardson said. "We've had it happen in Houston, although it didn't get as far as the pushing and shoving."