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	Are More Teachers Crossing the Line? By Karen Branch-Brioso Tampa Tribune March 22, 2008 http://www2.tbo.com/content/2008/mar/22/na-are-more-teachers-crossing-the-line/ TAMPA - The headlines are enough to make a parent shudder: "Teacher, Boy Had Affair, Officials Say." "Another Educator Facing Sex Charges." In the past week, two Hillsborough County public schoolteachers, former Davidsen Middle School math teacher Stephanie Ragusa and Freedom High English teacher Mary Jo Spack, were arrested and charged with having unlawful sex with underage students. Since 2005, at least 10 schoolteachers in Hillsborough and neighboring counties have been arrested on similar charges. Are we facing an epidemic? National experts on the subject say they don't think so. Most seem to agree, though, that reporting of such crimes is on the rise, and they attribute it to a number of things. In the wake of the sexual abuse scandals that shook the Catholic Church, the once-taboo subject of challenging trusted authority figures' relationships with underage children is far less taboo. It's easier to question a priest's relationship with a minor, and it's OK to challenge a schoolteacher, too. The price the Catholic Church paid in the wake of those scandals also is having the effect of motivating more schools to actively seek prosecution of teachers who stray, says David Finkelhor, a University of New Hampshire sociology professor and director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center. "I'm doubtful that there's an epidemic going on," Finkelhor said. "I do think there's more reporting. One of the things that's changed is the very large liability lawsuits that happened in the wake of the priest abuse stuff. I think that has sensitized schools to the liability that they themselves may incur if they don't really take a very proactive stance with regard to these things. "There was, perhaps, more in the past, a tendency of them to try and keep it under wraps. Get rid of the teacher. Negotiate something out, but not allow it to get public." No more. Particularly since the nationally publicized case of Greco Middle School teacher Debra Lafave in 2005, the local cases against teachers charged with having sex with students have multiplied. In her case, the 14-year-old boy's aunt found out and told his mother. The mother told the police. It's more than just parents reporting, though. Schoolmates of the victims are going to school officials. Other teachers are repeating charges. The underage victims themselves, often the most reluctant to report, also are coming forward. That was the case last year of a 16-year-old girl who went straight to a school dean at Bartow High School to say math teacher Isaac Tillis had offered her an "A" if she performed oral sex on him. Police arrested Tillis the next day after they said he repeated the offer to her while she recorded it with a hidden listening device. Reporting On The Upswing "There's definitely an increase in the reporting of these crimes," said Pam Bondi, spokeswoman for the Hillsborough State Attorney's Office. "We have greater police work. We have children willing to come forward, but what we can't determine is whether it's been going on unreported" in the past. Charol Shakeshaft, chairwoman of Educational Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University, thinks many such crimes often go unreported. She conducted a 2004 nationwide study for the U.S. Department of Education. It found 7 percent of students between kindergarten and graduation from high school reported being the target of physical sexual exploitation by an adult who works in a school. "Only about 9 percent of those kids actually report their abuse," Shakeshaft said. "Ninety to 91 percent of cases never get to the police." Shakeshaft, however, thinks that such crimes are being reported more. As cases are more widely publicized in the media, she said, the awareness grows among parents that there are many people who sexually exploit children "and that's more likely to be true." Some of it is getting reported because the digital rumor mill is churning out information so much faster than in the past. With many students now carrying cell phones, gossip about teacher trysts with students spreads rapidly. After Spack's arrest, administration officials said students were text-messaging each other about the party at a motel room where Spack is accused of taking two students and having sex with one of them. Another teacher heard the rumors and reported them to administrators. In 2006, Pasco Middle School band teacher Michael Black's sexual encounters with a 14-year-old student were discovered by her parents, thanks to the multiple calls he made to the girl's cell phone at all hours of day and night. E-mail, Cell Phones Leave Digital Clues The digital age has made prosecution of such crimes much easier, said Nan Stein, a senior research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women who has served as an expert witness in lawsuits concerning child sex abuse in schools. She equates it to former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who resigned recently after prosecutors uncovered his plans to meet a prostitute on wiretaps and in text messages. "This is like Eliot Spitzer. If you put it in an e-mail, you're marked forever," Stein said. "The fact that there's e-mails or photos or text messages, we have a chain of evidence. So we have a lot of stupidity mixed with bravado with this documentation. I think we have a great pathetic example of Eliot Spitzer and what we see is children and teachers mimicking that kind of behavior." In most of the recent cases locally where teachers have been charged with soliciting sex or having sex with underage students, the teachers have been women, which seems to contradict the statistics. Shakeshaft's 2004 study found that men were six times more likely than women to sexually exploit students in school. However, of the 10 local cases, just three of the accused teachers were men. Does that make the Tampa Bay area cases an anomaly? Shakeshaft doesn't think so. She thinks that so many more women have been arrested than men because, simply, there are far more female teachers than male teachers. "Seventy-five percent of schools' adult population is female and 25 percent is male," she said. "An individual male is more likely to be an exploiter, but because there are three times as many women as men in schools, they account for a large percentage of the abuse." Reporter Karen Branch-Brioso can be reached at (813) 259-7815 or kbranch-brioso@tampatrib.com.
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