A student who allegedly had sexual relations with a Martinsville High School teacher is being transferred to the school district’s alternative school, MHS Principal Don Alkire said Tuesday. Alkire said the decision to transfer was made by the student’s family.
“I’ve talked with the mother, and the student obviously is feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed,” he said. “We are going to have the student, for the rest of the year, enrolled in our alternative school, so he can get caught back up with his studies.”
Other than transferring the student, however, Alkire said the atmosphere at the high school was “business as usual,” with students and teachers trying to make up for time lost to snow days and delays last week. Lori Lund, director of guidance at MHS, said Friday she hasn’t seen any extra traffic in the guidance office. “One teacher came to me today, her first period class was talking a lot about it,” she said. “She just said it isn’t appropriate to be talking about it in class right now, that we need to focus on the subject matter. She asked me if there was anything else she should’ve done, and I said she did exactly what she should have done.”
Lund said there had not been any meetings with teachers or students to talk about the alleged sexual misconduct.
John Seryak, a board member of the non-profit awareness group Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation, said quietly moving beyond reports of sexual misconduct is a common reaction for schools - but one that can prevent a dialogue of prevention, he said. “I’d certainly rather air out our dirty linen to protect kids than hide everything and not do a good job of figuring out how to have a better system and culture in the school district,” he said
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When a similar crime took place at our school there was a grim faculty meeting. Teachers were warned that it would be an act of insubordination to discuss any aspect of the case anywhere on school grounds. This included private conversations in the teachers' lounge or elsewhere. Classroom discussions were out of the question.
2 comments:
What seems to me like the obvious, though rarely asked, question in these cases is :What do we expect?
Kids are raised in a culture that prizes sexual adventure and experience. When you get late teenage males together with women in their twenties, why should we be shocked when this kind of thing happens?
Dean,
The only reason that we might not expect it, is because it is no longer tolerated. In days of yore, abusive teachers could play blackmail trump cards. In exchange for the silence of the child’s parents, the teen (usually a girl) and the family could escape humiliation—the kind of finger-pointing and taunts often ending in the word “whore.” By allowing the teacher to quietly slip away with his credentials intact to another district, the school would escape public scandal and civil lawsuits. That was the devil’s bargain. When protecting children became more of a priority and communities simply applied existing criminal statutes, the public saw a marked upswing in jailed teachers. Then these people finally got the message: jailbait means jailbait. They stopped or left the profession. I don’t have the stats, but I don’t see as many stories about abusive male teachers as I used to when prosecutors first started to take the problem seriously back in the 80s and early 90s . I really believe that vigorous prosecution has put a dent in male teachers preying on teen girls. Instead, we see this curious trend of female teachers, who in spite of harsh penalties, pursue obsessive, delusional romantic and sexual relationships with boys. That’s the shocking part. Maybe there is nothing new about female teachers abusing their male students, but it certainly grabs more headlines these days, and I think I can safely say that ever more consistent enforcement means that they too will be going to jail-quite a cultural shift I would say.
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