How?

EDITORIAL


Sept 17-2007 - From the The Greenville Times, "How can schools prevent sexual crimes?"

Universities and public school administrators do take pains to encourage and enforce moral and ethical behavior on the part of teachers. In most all university education courses, for instance, prospective teachers are reminded that they are acting in loco parentis -- and must be good role models, maintaining high standards of conduct.

New teachers in South Carolina, meanwhile, are mentored through the ADEPT (Assisting, Developing and Evaluating Professional Teaching) system, which stresses high ethical and moral standards. All teachers and principals undergo some form of mentoring. Appropriately, the state is revising its ADEPT standards of conduct to even more aggressively emphasize high standards of behavior.

Principals, most of all, set the tone in a school. If there's anything to be done to prevent cases of teacher misconduct, it probably depends on principals making it clear that any sort of unethical behavior by teachers will not be tolerated.

TT - We find most of the teachers are arrested for sex crimes, are not 20-somethings, although there are a lot of those. Most are 30 and up. They are well-established, popular teachers, very effective, respected by their peers, often married with children. They attend all the annual lectures on classroom behavior, listen to advisories never to be alone with students, show up for the the styrofoam-cup-and blackboard chalk talks on what constitutes teacher misconduct and the consequences.

Flat out, we advocate random lie detector testing to ask teachers if they have been involved, or know of anyone involved, with a student. Because teachers know when other teachers are having sex with their students. They simply don't report it.