NOT GUILTY VERDICTDavid Janssen, 55, an Appleton, Wisconsin teacher was found not guilty of all counts by a jury. The charges were from an alleged 1996-2000 encounter with two former students.
TT - Link
SENTENCED -possession of and prepared to sell crystal methamphetamine
His arrest made headlines at the time. It's not every day that a school principal is arrested for selling drugs out of his office. John Acerra, 50, was sentenced to 2-4 years in prison, followed by five years probation. (Pennsylvania)
TT - Link
GUILTY PLEA -lewd acts on a child
Charged with 12 counts in an indictment, a San Bernardino School District Administrator was allowed to plead to two felony counts of lewd acts on a child. The No Contest plea provides for - get ready - 180 days in jail (not prison) and she can serve her time on the weekends or at home with a monitoring device. It's a generous settlement with Michelle Rossi, 36, who had a year-long affair with a 14-year-old girl when Rossi was a middle school teacher. She'll permanently lose her teaching and administrative credentials and must register as a sex offender, but it's a good reminder that without sex offender registration, a lot of sexual predators are barely punished for their crimes.
TT - Link
HEADED FOR TRIAL - child endangerment, assault, harassment
A judge ruled there was sufficient evidence to hold Heather M. Spriggle, 38, for trial for felony count of endangering the welfare of a child, a misdemeanor count of simple assault and a summary charge of harassment. The classroom abuse of the 13-year-old developmentally disabled child was witnessed by aides. (Pennsylvania)
TT - Link
HEADED FOR TRIAL - Solicitation of murder
In Alabama, Sharon Rutherford, 30, will go on trial Oct 20. She is accused of having sex (we refuse to call it "an affair") with a student and convinced him to kill her husband. She was indicted for making advances to two other students in her classroom. The husband was unharmed, although we will have to wait for the trial to find out the circumstances.
TT - Link
ARRESTED - Solicitation of sex from a minor
Charles Hadley, 39, a North Carolina teacher, was arrested for soliciting sex from a minor in an online chatroom. Police suspected him of improper online chats and investigators posed as a 15-year-old.
TT - Link
ARRESTED - Contributing to the delinquency of a minor
In South Carolina, Janet Fackovec, 25, is charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor for allegedly having sex with a teenage student. Detectives arrested her at the school. She's been suspended with pay.
TT - Link
ARRESTED - sexual battery by an authority figure
An assistant football coach and also teaches in-school suspension, was arrested after a grand jury indicted him on sexual battery charges. Huana Jennings, 36, has been suspended with pay. A teacher at the high school passed along the information to school authorities. (Tennessee)
TT - Link
COACH DISMISSED
A coach was dismissed in Maryland after a reporter made inquiries about revocation of teaching licenses and it turned out that the coach had lost his New Jersey license to teach after an "incident." He claims he never went to court on the charges and that he doesn't need a teaching license to coach. He's hiring an attorney. It sent us on another rant about how some teachers are able to bargain with their licenses and avoid harsher sentencing or avoid court altogether.
We don't know that that's the case here, but anyoen who loses their license to teach in one state shouldn't be in any school in any state.
TT - Link
A TRAIL OF MISCONDUCT
A teacher was hired in Florida after having had an inappropriate relationship with a female student in Oklahoma and a sexual relationship with one in Georgia for which he was tried. The result of the 2001 trial was a mistrial. Bizarrely, the superintendent of the school district where he taught in Georgia not only failed to disclose to other schools this teacher's problems, but later resigned because she failed to report her daughter's - a school counselor - misconduct.
We're still wondering how a background check failed to turn up the 2001 court case and whether any school district should have taken a chance on the teacher. (Naturally, the reporter points to a national registry as a solution. It doesn't work in Canada, and how someone could think that districts that don't even report to the state would think that they would report to some national registry? Not when reporting might subject them to lawsuits.)
TT - Link
BALTIMORE SUN EDUCATION BLOG
More and more newspapers are creating education blogs. We found the length of the teacher's school year and day gleaned from contracts at one of the Baltimore Sun blog entries. Talk about UNDERWORKED. We haven't been able to find a Part I and have no idea what that contained, but this was fascinating as well as the link to negotiated contracts from a Maryland Superintendent's Association.
TT - Link
BEST READING OF THE DAY
Even if you don't live in Illinois, you'll want to read the new series, "Hidden Violations." It's the second series by Scott Reeder and the Small Family Newspaper Group. His award-winning 2005 series, "The Hidden Costs of Tenure" will bolster every argument you've ever had about bad tenure is. In "Hidden Violations" you find out just how casual Illinois is toward teacher misconduct. We kind of guessed it from the cases we see, but they contacted all 50 state education departments and built a database of revocations and suspensions. And it will confirm your suspicions about revocations.
TT - Link
