Educator Sexual Misconduct Is On The Rise In US Public Schools: Report

Groups that lure pedophiles out into the open were vindicated by a British court in 2017. Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo

From sexting to rape, there is a disturbing uptick in sexual misconduct by public school teachers and other staff against students across the United States.

The growing problem was recently highlighted by an audit of Chicago public schools where dozens of staff members ranging from teachers, administrators, and counselors, to security officers—even a sign language interpreter—were found guilty of committing a variety of sex crimes against students while in school.

The audit was conducted by the Sexual Assault Unit of the Chicago school’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG).

The OIG did not respond to inquiries by The Epoch Times about the audit’s findings.

Inappropriate Touching

Over the course of some 50 pages, the OIG detailed case after case of teachers grooming children as young as elementary age for sex, texting pictures of their genitals to students, making sexual advances on them such as kissing, fondling, and inappropriate touching, and sexual assault.

Several school workers were found to possess child pornography on their phones and in one case, a school janitor was arrested after it was discovered he was secretly videotaping children in the school bathroom with a cellphone he had hidden under a sink.

In another case, a male special education teacher was found to have spent seven months grooming an 8th-grade student and then ultimately having sex with the girl in her home. In another case, a male high school teacher was found to have sent more than 4,000 sexual texts to a student including 400 messages in just one day.

The teacher also told the female student he had a sexual relationship with a male student, and that he had an open marriage.

The OIG found that in some of the cases, staff members knew about the sexual misconduct, but failed to report it—as was the case involving a high school physical education teacher who exposed himself to female students by pulling down his pants and showing his genitals.

According to the report, the teacher, who has a daughter around the age of the female students, sent videos via social media to at least one of the students of himself masturbating and engaging in other sexual acts.

The student was able to provide several of the clips to the OIG.

California to Maine

“Public schools are a scary place,” said Brian Rohrbough, founder of the Facebook group The Real Truth About Public Schools.

The group tracks sexual misconduct by public school employees against school kids and posts them on their Facebook page. A review of them shows the cases are from California to Maine.

Rohrbough and his wife Lisa originally started the Real Truth About Public School to track safety flaws after their 15-year-old son Daniel was killed in the tragic Columbine school shooting in 1999.

While they track school shootings, public school corruption, and other problems, they said educator sexual misconduct dominates their posts, which sometimes are as many as 10 cases a day.

And like the incidents in the Chicago schools, the group has found that most of the sex crimes being committed by public school workers nationwide are severe.

Rohrbough believes the reason for the rampant problem comes with a simple explanation. “Child molesters go with the kids,” he said.

The reason why it remains largely unaddressed, he believes, is because a liberal media together with liberal lawmakers do not want it to get out to the “public eye” that public schools are a breeding ground for sex crimes against kids.

“This is the god they worship,” he said.

National experts like Carol Shakeshaft, who was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education to study the problem, have come to similar conclusions, pointing out the focus on sex abuse involving Catholic priests and The Boy Scouts despite the fact that sex abuse of students by public school staff is “100 times higher.”

Shakeshaft, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor and fellow for the American Educational Research Association, has written books on the subject including a recent one entitled “Organization Betrayal: How Schools Enable Employee Sexual Misconduct and How to Stop It.”

Catching Predators

Alex Rosen, a former college football player, works the frontlines on the problem. He runs an online version of the now-defunct popular NBC TV show To Catch A Predator.

Under the name Predator Poachers, which can be seen on Rumble, Rosen and others pose as minors online to catch predators in the act of committing sex crimes against children. He told The Epoch Times the predators are often teachers or public school employees.

Rosen, who calls himself a “pedo whisperer,” also told The Epoch Times his work has led him to believe there is a connection between educator sex crimes against kids and the current trend to push transgendering of kids by schools.

That conclusion comes from cases like one he is working on involving an Oregon elementary school teacher he confronted for filming kids at school and posting them online. Rosen, who turns his cases over to police after hunting down the predators and confronting them, said he also discovered the teacher was putting his 8-year-old boy in dresses and then filming him.

Rosen said “grooming” kids has become an industry that satisfies a variety of desires, from financial to perverted pleasure.

“Child predators have weird sexual fetishes,” he said, “transgender is the new fetish.”

Rosen also posts on Twitter under “iFightForKids.”

Persistent And Growing Problem

Shakeshaft is currently working under a $1.2 million grant from the CDC on educator sexual misconduct in public schools.

She co-authored a study of sexual abuse in 1994 for Phi Delta Kappan, which looks at public school policies and practices.

Then there was her DOE report in 2004, which includes a report that an estimated 10 percent—or a little more than 4 million children—were victims of sexual misdeeds by public school staff members.

A 2014 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office entitled, “Federal Agencies Can Better Support State Efforts to Prevent and Respond to Sexual Abuse by School Personnel” found that sexual grooming of students by public school employees remains a persistent and growing problem.

Rohrbough believes another main reason the problem persists is that public school administrators pressure parents to let them handle sex crimes against their children by staff “in-house.”

“They tell the parents how much it will harm the child if it goes to court or becomes highly publicized, and tell them they'll terminate the teacher, but what they really do is just move the teacher to another district,” said Rohrbough, “and they just go on re-offending.”