When teachers are abusers

[Woodmonkey]

When teachers are abusers


After Kelsey Peterson, a 25-year-old Nebraska middle school teacher,fled to Mexico recently with a 13-year-old former student, she waspublicly fired by her school board.

That seems an easy call, yet hundreds of other teachers who arecaught having sexual contact with students end up getting away with it,usually when the case appears difficult to prove, expensive toprosecute or embarrassing to the school district. The offendingteachers slip away and teach elsewhere, often protected byconfidentiality agreements.

A recent Associated Press investigation found 2,570 educators across the USA whose teaching credentials were revoked, surrendered or sanctioned from 2001 to 2005. But in many cases, the public never found out:

* In Missouri, a teacher who resigned from one school after multiple complaints of sexual harassment managed to move on quietly and work for three more districts.

* In Northern California, a basketball coach had sexual relations with several teens. She was sentenced to a year in jail and had to register as a sex offender. But the California teaching commission reported only that her license was revoked for misconduct.

* In Iowa, a teacher was fired from his job for touching a fifth-grader's breast, but that didn't end his career. He went on to teach for decades, fighting a half-dozen similar abuse charges arising from other teaching jobs in Illinois and Iowa.

Some states are moving to make it harder for school districts to hide such crimes. In Maine, where state officials refused to release teacher disciplinary actions to the AP reporters, the governor has vowed to change confidentiality laws. In Missouri, legislators are considering a bill that would ban confidentiality agreements in sexual abuse cases. And in Florida, legislators are debating a registry of teacher offenders.

The changes are helpful, but only if accompanied by a public awareness campaign. Students need to know that challenging popular teachers who abuse their positions of authority is the right thing to do (but that false accusations will be dealt with harshly). Superintendents need to understand that passing an abuser to another district is just as unacceptable as the Catholic Church shifting pedophile priests from parish to parish.

Nearly all of the USA's 3 million public school teachers are beyond reproach. Identifying and drumming out the relatively few offenders might be cause for embarrassment, but it's vital to the safety of the nation's schoolchildren.

Source

[leobold1]

Its too long to list, but World Net Daily (wnd.com) compiled the list of all known female teacher sex offenders.

The list: WorldNetDaily: The big list: Female teachers with students

ALL 121 (ONE HUNDRED TWENTY ONE) OF THEM!

[Woodmonkey]

I'm willing to bet that most of them, especially the pretty ones, got a slap on the wrist compared to what a man would get.