Bob Raines, the former superintendent of Shoreline Unified School District, has been sentenced to 210 days in jail and one year of probation for engaging in lewd conduct with a child.

At a hearing on Monday, Marin County Superior Court Judge Beth Jordan also ordered the former administrator to register as a sex offender and prohibited him from having any contact with the victim, who was 11 years old when he testified against Mr. Raines last November.

The boy told the court that Mr. Raines had touched him on his back and reached into his pocket and touched his buttock. 

Mr. Raines, a 69-year-old Petaluma resident, plans to appeal the case, according to his attorney, Charles Dresow, who declined further comment.

Mr. Raines was arrested in June 2021 after a Shoreline employee reported that she had seen him with his hand in her son’s pocket, stroking his leg near his groin. She reported the incident to the school district just weeks before Mr. Raines was due to retire after 43 years in education, the last five at Shoreline. She said the incident occurred in Mr. Raines’s office.

During the trial, a second former student, who is now 27, testified that Mr. Raines had subjected him to similar inappropriate behavior during the 2006-2007 school year, when he was a student at Wilson Elementary School in Petaluma, where Mr. Raines was serving as principal. 

Ellen Lesher, a former teacher at Wilson Elementary, confirmed the second student’s account during the trial and testified that she had seen several fourth- and fifth-grade boys sitting on his lap in his office. When she confronted him, Mr. Raines laughed it off, she said. 

She notified the school board and the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office, but no charges were filed in that case.

Ms. Lesher attended Monday’s sentencing hearing and was pleased with the outcome.

“The judge was excellent,” Ms. Lesher said. “She mentioned several times that he showed no remorse and said that this has been going on for too long. I feel like justice has finally been served after 17 years—probably more than the 17 years I know about.”

After the sentence was announced, she introduced herself to the Shoreline student’s mother, who spoke during the hearing.

“She read a heart-wrenching statement about the emotional toll this has taken,” Ms. Lesher said. “I was happy to meet her and the victim’s grandmother and have a cry with them.”

Mr. Raines, who has previously denied the accusations against him, did not speak during the hearing or testify during his trial. He was initially charged with a felony, but that charge was later reduced to a misdemeanor—described in the criminal statute as “annoying or molesting a child.” The lower charge did not require proving that Mr. Raines had touched the boy, but only that he had engaged in disturbing behavior motivated by unnatural sexual interest. It carried a maximum charge of one year in jail.

Josie Sanguinetti, the retired Marin County sheriff’s deputy who investigated Mr. Raines, told the Light that she was disappointed that the District Attorney’s office had dropped the felony charge. Nevertheless, she attended yesterday’s hearing and was “delighted” when Judge Jordan announced the sentence.

“This is someone who has worked with children for a long time and who has very obviously—as the jury found—taken advantage of them for a long time,” she said. “This child is going to have a lifelong history of trauma. It’s always awful when you have a trusted adult who takes advantage of a weak population.”

Both boys testified that Mr. Raines had let them play in his office and treated them like friends. The Wilson elementary student said he had lunch in Mr. Raines’s office several days a week, when he sat on the principal’s lap and watched video games on his computer. 

When the original charges were filed, Shoreline immediately placed Mr. Raines on administrative leave. He was replaced by the current superintendent, Adam Jennings, who had already been hired at the time of the arrest.

After Mr. Raines was convicted, Mr. Jennings issued a statement to the school community expressing shock that a leader of the district could engage in such inappropriate conduct.

“Prior to his hire, Mr. Raines underwent criminal background checks and extensive reference checking that did not identify any complaints of inappropriate conduct with students nor any prior criminal convictions,” he wrote.

This week, Mr. Jennings told the Light that he hoped Mr. Raines’s sentence would offer some comfort to the victim and his family. 

“We hope that this will help them to find some closure,” he said.