Inaction keeps sexual misconduct in schools

updated 8:12 p.m. ET Oct. 22, 2007

Every school has rules governing teacher behavior. Every state has laws against child abuse, and many specifically outlaw teachers’ taking sexual liberties with students. Every district has administrators who watch out for sexual misconduct by teachers.

Yet people like Chad Maughan stay in the classroom.

Maughan got in trouble twice for viewing pornography at schools in Washington state but was allowed to keep teaching. Within two years, he was convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl in his school.

Legal loopholes, fear of lawsuits and inattention all have weakened the safeguards that are supposed to protect children in school. The system fails hundreds of kids each year, an AP investigation found. It undoubtedly fails many more whose offenders go free.

State efforts to strengthen laws against sex abuse by teachers have run into opposition from school boards and teachers unions. In Congress, a measure that would train investigators and create a national registry of offenders hasn’t even gotten a hearing. Few leaders recognize — let alone attack — a national shame.

“Instead of ignoring it or fighting it, why don’t you get ahead of it?” says Ted Thompson, executive director of the National Association to Prevent Sexual Abuse of Children.

Patchwork laws to protect kids
An Associated Press investigation identified 2,570 cases from 2001 to 2005 in which teachers were punished or removed from the classroom for sexual misconduct. The allegations ranged from fondling to rape. Reporters in all 50 states and the District of Columbia gathered the cases from state agencies with responsibility for teacher licensing.

Even accounting for population differences, states vary widely on how many teachers they discipline and how rigorously, the investigation showed. That reflects the patchwork nature of the laws and rules that aim to protect schoolchildren. Each state takes its own approach to background checks, fingerprinting and reporting abuse.

While states have taken halting steps toward accountability in recent years after decades of widespread neglect, there are still many gaps.

Some states check fingerprints against records only in their own states, not the FBI databases, so they miss offenders from other states. Others check for violations only when teachers are newly hired, missing veteran teachers who have run afoul of the law since they were first hired.

“You can fingerprint them all you want, and nothing’s going to come up,” says John Seryak, a longtime Ohio middle school teacher who now trains teachers to spot when a colleague is abusing kids.

School systems also have made an attempt at weeding out wrongdoers. For the past 20 years, educators have shared information with other states about teachers who’ve run into administrative trouble.

A flawed list
The National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification created the list, and Roy Einreinhofer, its executive director, says protecting children is one of the group’s top goals.

But the list has its flaws.

It only provides identifying information such as names, birth dates and Social Security numbers, nothing describing a teacher’s past problems, leaving it up to a state agency or a hiring school district to dig deeper. Also, the list is not publicly available.

“There are some liability issues involved there,” Einreinhofer says. “It just serves as a flag saying you need to check this person further.”

Created in 1987, the list contains names of some 37,000 teachers who have had license problems, which includes all misbehavior, not just sexual.

Similar piecemeal efforts have often run into resistance, from lawmakers reluctant to tackle the subject, from teacher unions concerned with privacy and due process, and from school boards worried about court fights.

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