By now, the horrors inflicted on students at the Hawaii School for the Deaf and Blind have been well reported. The state Department of Education last spring settled a class-action civil lawsuit that claimed adults who should have protected some of Hawaii’s most vulnerable students had instead tolerated and covered up a "Lord of the Flies" campus culture that permitted a small group of teenage boys to terrorize their fellow students.

Girls and boys between the ages of 12 and 16 reported being raped, sodomized, robbed, coerced into sexual activity and otherwise abused at the public boarding school in Kapahulu, including in dorms and on school buses. The lawsuit, which was filed in 2011, claimed that DOE officials had known about the abuse for years, but did not act forcefully enough to stop it.

Under the terms of the $5.75 million settlement finalized in April, students who were sexually assaulted or who witnessed attacks will be compensated at varying amounts. There are believed to be about 35 such victims — at a school that has only about 80 students total — and more may come forward. Of the total settlement, the taxpayers, via the DOE, are responsible for paying $5 million, and a former school counselor is responsible for $750,000. He and the principal at the time were replaced. At least four of the teenage perpetrators — known as the "ringleaders" — faced criminal charges in juvenile court, where proceedings are secret.

Which brings us to a new phase: the first criminal charges filed against an adult who worked at the school. An Oahu grand jury returned an indictment last week against a former teacher’s aide accused of sexually assaulting a student in 2005, when the girl was 14.

The suspect, 29 at the time, faces two counts of first-degree sexual assault. These charges are the exception, given that student-on-student crime was the more typical accusation. Still, parents and educators throughout the state should pay attention. This case, if it goes to trial, will play out in public, because the suspect was an adult at the time. New information about institutional culture and educational practices may come to light.

There is much to learn from the toxic environment that was allowed to fester at Hawaii’s only public school for deaf and blind students. But the case was so extreme — in the large number of alleged victims, the severity of the alleged abuse and the fact that it occurred within a unique population at an insular institution — that it was easy to dismiss as an outlier, something that couldn’t happen anywhere else. That is a mistaken assumption.

Essentially, the terrorized students were victims of extreme bullying, dominated by students older, stronger and more popular and traumatized by the fear that going public with the mistreatment could shutter their school and ostracize them from their community.

Bullies can exist at practically every school — public, private, regular-ed, special-ed — but they can only grow strong when the adults who should be in charge fail to act. There’s a lesson in that for all of us.