Schools redraw the sexual lines

By Greg Barrett, Gannett News Service

UNION BRIDGE, Md. — The day two years ago when Kimberly Merson first went to Francis Scott Key High School in rural Maryland to teach, she told herself, "Don't work at a high school. It will just be too tempting."

Merson, who turns 25 soon, had considered herself unattractive as a teenager. But the braces, glasses and permed hair disappeared, and now she is tall and slender with brown hair and hazel eyes. Teenage boys were drawn to her.

And she to them, never mind that she considered herself a Christian and was married to a Key High teacher who was an assistant football coach.

Merson recounted all this for police this spring after being charged with — and later pleading guilty to — various crimes for engaging in numerous sexual acts with nine Key High boys, some star athletes, some as young as 15. Sometimes, several in one night.

As shocking as this was to Carroll County Public Schools, a countryside community long on churches and conservative politics, Merson was the first of three district teachers arrested this spring on unrelated charges stemming from sexual advances on students. The others involved a 21-year-old female student-teacher who allegedly drank alcohol with teenage boys at her house, and a 49-year-old male elementary school teacher indicted on charges of molesting six young boys over two decades.

More attention to the issue

But Carroll County is no anomaly. A sampling of the summer headlines:

"Girl's family sues teacher accused of sex with students" (Houma, La., Aug. 20); "High school teacher convicted of (statutory) rape, sodomy of her students" (White Plains, N.Y., Aug. 4); "Teacher given probation after pleading guilty to sex crime" (Charlotte, N.C., July 24); "Teacher pleads guilty to four sex offenses" (Lexington, Ky., July 19).

So it might surprise you when an education expert finds something positive amid the misconduct. The public and the news media are discussing something that once was dealt with quietly, says Charol Shakeshaft, a Hofstra University education professor who has studied cases of teacher-student sex for a decade.

"The number of incidents being reported does signal to me a positive trend," she says, "which is to pay attention to the issue and do something about it."

But what? It's a question for which there seem no surefire answers.

The National Education Association points out the nation's overall decline in reported child sexual abuse, from 149,800 cases in 1992 to 103,600 in 1998, according to the Justice Department, and the occasional fraudulent claim by students.

Anecdotal evidence

Still, there's no guarantee that sex abusers won't be hired.

"There was nothing that we did that we think we ought to change," says Carroll County's interim superintendent of schools, Charles Ecker. "We do screen the people. There was nothing that needed to be changed."

Education officials say the sexual harassment of students has not escalated, but this is supported only by anecdotal evidence. The tracking of such things began less than a decade ago, Shakeshaft says, soon after school administrators inquired and she discovered no one was keeping tabs. Shakeshaft since has followed teacher-sex cases and surveyed students.

She estimates that the percentage of students from kindergarten through high school who experience sexual advances of some sort from school staff has increased from 15% to about 18% during the decade.

A survey distributed in 2000 by the Washington-based American Association of University Women Foundation suggested a more widespread — and mostly unreported — problem, but one slightly on the wane. In the self-administered and subjective questionnaire given to 2,064 public school students nationally in grades 8 through 11, about 38% claim teachers and other school employees sexually harass students by word, look or deed, compared with 44% of respondents polled in 1993. This could include everything from indiscreet jokes to groping and kissing.

"The school system is a microcosm of society," says Ecker, 72, a veteran of 37 years in public education. Sexual harassment "happens in business, and it happens in school systems, unfortunately."

Checking backgrounds

A representative of personality appraisal tests has approached the Carroll County school district to see if it would like to probe deeper into the psyches of its job candidates. There also have been suggestions that no teacher under 25 be hired. Or, at least, no teacher younger than 25 be assigned to a high school.

All of these strategies would be ripe for discrimination lawsuits, says Cyndy Little, Carroll County's director of pupil services and special programs. Besides, she says, some of the best high school teachers are young and enthusiastic and make a connection with students that older teachers often lack.

Even before Merson applied to work as a permanent substitute teacher in Carroll County, all applicants underwent FBI fingerprint checks and criminal background investigations. As a substitute who showed up for work every school day, Merson also was required to read and sign a handbook that explains inappropriate teacher-student conduct in a way that seems to overstate the obvious.

"Asking for a date," the handbook reads, "dating or exploiting the teacher/student relationship by soliciting or actually engaging in sexual relations is not to occur between Carroll County Public Schools employees and students."

Students, too, are being schooled. This was a recommendation this summer from a peer facilitator group made up of county students.

"Students need to know that it is inappropriate for a staff member to ask them out on a date," Little says. "We might think that is common sense, but if you think of the staff-student relationship, the student might think, wow, this person is taking me out to dinner, and not think that it is overstepping boundaries."

Parents are part of solution

Carroll County is a grid of suburban developments and farm towns northwest of Baltimore. Key High School, meanwhile, is a vibrant school community built upon hundreds of acres of shaved cornfields. It's the kind of place where parents show up at football practice or band rehearsal or a soccer scrimmage with lawn chairs and camcorders and stay until the sun sets.

And it's the type of place, today, where parents might show up in school unannounced. Which is a good idea for parents in any school district, says Jean Wasmer, president of the Carroll County Council of PTAs and a mother of three daughters.

Even before the teacher arrests that marred the 2000-2001 school year, Wasmer was uncomfortable last year when her 15-year-old daughter stayed after school with a male teacher at Carroll County's Westminster High.

"So I popped in and made it a point to meet the teacher. ... There was nothing inappropriate going on, and there were other students there with them," she recalls, "but I wanted to let (the teacher) know that I was there, I was involved."

The schoolboys involved with Merson partook willingly, parents here point out, but the public admonishment of them is often softened with a wink. There have been restrained chuckles and talk that "boys will be boys."

"But why can't we expect adults to behave as adults?" Wasmer says. "As parents we are fighting so much in society, and the last thing we need are educators doing this. We need every help we can get in showing our kids proper behavior."