I taught in an inner-city high school for two years. It was a sabbatical from my work as a consultant. I chose ninth graders because I wanted to be able to shape their entry to high school learning.?It had been 20 years since I got my teaching certificate, and man, had schools changed!
There was the teacher who used my room for one class. His students told me he spent the hour talking about having sex with a prostitute. They were disgusted. If you knew him, you would know it was true. I felt like scrubbing down the walls.
A substitute teacher showed porn in her classes for a week before she was caught. I noticed in all of these situations that the students were far more moral than those who were supposed to be teaching them.
We had a young male teacher who hit on his female students, but no one could ever seem to catch him. The students solved the problem themselves. Not one girl enrolled in his class.
I asked some of the really excellent teachers about the situation and spoke to administrators, but it seems the culture was too ingrained for them to change – if they even cared enough to do so.
When teachers have sex with their students, they take advantage of kids in an especially vile manner. It is bad because in order to learn students must make themselves receptive, open, and vulnerable. That is exactly when predators attack.
Alabama wins number one in the teacher-student sex category, the U.S. Department of Education’s report?tells us.
?It’s shocking,? said one former department official. ?We’re seeing way too many sexual predators in our classrooms.?
It is deplorable when we hear about Jennifer Marie Perry, a married 27-year-old ninth grade English teacher in Odenville, La. Police reported this week?that she was arrested for pleasuring a 17-year-old student in a car near school grounds.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that Perry,
??is booked with having sexual contact with a 17-year-old student at Pinson Valley High School near Birmingham. The teacher and the student allegedly met a few miles away from campus in a parking lot and engaged in a consensual sex act inside a vehicle, authorities said.?
Former teacher Perry resigned and turned herself over to the police. She was arrested on March 13 and released from county jail on bond.?She will never teach again.
We don’t know if she taught in an inner-city high school or not. Regardless, a sexually-charged education environment is a despicable situation. We owe our kids better. Far better.
