Ohio State University agreed Wednesday to pay approximately $100 million to settle legal claims from hundreds of former student athletes who said they were sexually abused decades ago by a doctor at the university.

The school has fought lawsuits in federal court since 2018 brought by former student athletes against the university over its failure to stop abuse by Dr. Richard Strauss.

Strauss worked at the school from 1978 to 1998 and also ran an off-campus clinic. He died in 2005.

During a meeting Wednesday, the school’s Board of Trustees approved a preliminary agreement with all but one of the 280 survivors with claims still involved in pending litigation. Once finalized, the settlement could mark the end of a lengthy legal battle and close a painful chapter in the school’s history.

“The survivors of the Strauss abuse are all Buckeyes, will always be a part of our family and our community, and I firmly believe that,” the school’s president, Ravi Bellamkonda, said during the meeting. “We continue to be very grateful to them for their courage in coming forward, and reaching a final resolution is very important to us and is an important step forward.”

Years ago, an independent report had concluded that scores of Ohio State personnel knew of complaints about Strauss’ conduct as early as 1979 but failed for years to investigate or take meaningful action.

In a joint statement Wednesday, the university and plaintiffs thanked mediators and said they were working to finalize the details of the settlements.

Ohio State already had settled with 317 survivors for more than $61 million, the school had said. Many former student athletes signed sealed agreements that kept their names a secret. Some former NFL players were among the victims, according to a lawyer in one of the lawsuits.

Two of Strauss’s accusers, former student athletes Steve Snyder-Hill and Ron McDaniel, spoke to “CBS Mornings” in 2018 about their experiences involving the late doctor.

“He was a doctor,” Snyder-Hill told “CBS Mornings” in a July 2018 interview. “I was a student. I went in there vulnerable. I was even more vulnerable because he had me de-clothed. And I’m sitting there in front of him. And everything’s going really badly.”

Snyder-Hill told “CBS Mornings” that after he reported an incident, the director of student health services wrote a letter saying it “had never received a complaint about Dr. Strauss before.”

But McDaniel said Strauss’ behavior had been an open secret for years.

“We thought we were doing the right thing in telling our coach,” McDaniel said. “They were the athletic department. We looked to the coaches, the trainers and the doctors to do the right thing.”