Students, Teachers, and Sex
I read an interesting statistic the other day that stated that there were over 2,400 documented instances of inappropriate student/teacher relationships in schools in the U.S. Of these relationship, about half of them went unpunished. This information came in the form of one of those little blurbs your read in a magazine that takes all of about 5 seconds to read (the-week.com). But that 5 second read combined with another article in the same magazine regarding the Portland, Maine, middle school scandal where the board voted to give birth control pills to their female students got me thinking about my next blog.
Thanks to Mary Kay Letoruneau and her famous TV movie have we had so much attention placed on the issue of sex in our schools. I know of two cases in the Dallas/Fort Worth area alone where teachers have been in inappropriate relationships with students which cost them their jobs and certificate.
I remember long ago when I was a student at Baylor University I used to umpire softball games to make ends meet. A game here and there would pay a decent wage to a struggling college kid and it was a common side job for other teachers and coaches who wanted to stay close to sports and make a little extra money. One of my fellow umpires was a teacher/coach at Waco High School and told me stories of how he knew fellow co-workers that were exchanging sexual favors for grades. Needless to say I was shocked but thought to myself, is this common?
Obviously so. Later, after I became a teacher, I heard that a middle school teacher in Waco, Texas, (the same middle school that I attended) was caught in his car receiving oral sex from a 14 year old student at a cemetery. The sad thing is, I went to high school with that guy. I played baseball and basketball with him as a kid and I knew his parents. In fact, I chipped my tooth falling off a skateboard in his driveway when I was 12.
My point in saying all of that is that all of these incidents that are occurring, these 2400 or so in the last year, are happening with people that we know and students that we are teaching. The sad fact is that it is probably happening right under your nose and you don’t even know it.
Since my college days, I suppose these types of relationship have become much easier with the advent of MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites. Not only are our students, as young as 10, using these sites to “meet people”, our teachers are doing it as well. From an administrator’s stand point, I firmly believe that my staff should be informed of the dangers of social networking or, as I call it, faceless communication. There is no emotional attachment to this type of communication so it can seem innocent. It’s also a forum where people seem to feel more free to reveal more about themselves than they should—Faceless Communication.
I want to caution my fellow educators of this type of communication and how creating these types of relationships with students can be damaging and hurt your career. All teachers may feel like they need to reach out to their students and be their buddy but I warn you that this is dangerous. Students don’t need buddies, they already have buddies, what they need are mentors who can model appropriate professional behaviors. This is how you can reach out to your students, everything else is wrong and inappropriate.
