Bad Love

Let's not forget about our lesbian sisters out there, teaching math, coaching basketball, and having affairs with 14 year-olds. Jaymee Lane Wallace, 28, was a Tampa teacher at Wharton High School who has pleaded not guilty to lewd and lascivious behaviour, which in this case means having a sexual relationship with one of the girls on the basketball team for 18 months.

She denies the relationship ever happened. While the girl has no evidence of the affair, she passed a polygraph test, and witnesses support her story. She says that Wallace approached her by stapling a note to a graded paper saying the girl was attractive. I can just see that note: "Hey. You're pretty hot. Your taut little quadratic equations totally turn me on. Call me."

I guess this tactic worked out for Jaymee! She got her student/player to have sex with her for a year and a half, only ending when the student broke it off, a year after Wallace got married to another teacher (some similarities to the UK make-out teacher.) Until she got busted.

She's gotten off easy so far: she's no longer coaching basketball or teaching math, but is still working in the school office.

Posted by Amy at 12:44 PM | Permalink

Two stories today about school employees caught having sex with teenage girls they were coaching. Both men seem to have acknowledged their crimes, and have pleaded guilty.

Craig DeBaise, 43, was the girls' basketball coach at Bishop Machebeuf High School in Denver.

In 1999, he had sex with a 16 year-old girl on the team, and for three months in 2000 had a number of encounters with a 17 year-old. About the 17 year-old, he said they had built a bond and that he was "falling in love with her." We can only hope the girl doesn't harbor any tender feelings for this sleazy looking creep. He pleaded guilty to only one count of sexual assault on a child by a person in a position of trust, a very apt legal category for Bad Love. He will be sentenced in December, and could get as little as two years.

Leonard Tyrone Alexander, 27, was a dance teacher and detention monitor at a charter school in Minneapolis.

He pleaded guilty to criminal sexual conduct with two girls, ages 12 and 14, who he taught in a hip-hop dance class. He admitted that he brought girls back to his apartment for extra dance practice, but really to have sex with them, on a few different occasions. The 14 year-old thought she was going back to his apartment to braid his hair. Leonard got nine years in prison. The charter school actually closed earlier this year. So much for idealistic notions of independently-managed public schools.

Posted by Amy at 01:11 PM | Permalink

The other day, we heard about the arrest of Lawrence Major, a Brooklyn high school gym teacher who had a three-year affair, of sorts, with a female student.

Apparently, the pressure or humiliation from his arrest was too much for him to handle: he committed suicide today, shooting himself in the head near his home.

The NY Post reported that Major was featured in a documentary film about mentors, and his students seem to have liked him: "The way he teaches you, you are able to talk about your problems," said one studen. "He was very understanding." Another added, "He was our friend. He treated us like we were his kids. He inspired us. He was very truthful and he kept it real."

Well, maybe the problem is, he didn't keep it real enough. We get the impression from reading these kinds of stories that the adult figures involved get completely in a fantasy life where it's okay to have sex with 13-year-olds because you understand them and they understand you. Your sex drive, or your neediness, or your despair tricks you into ditching painful or inconvenient reality in favor of an unreality where everything is ok and you make the rules.

But, sooner or later, reality is going to catch up with you, usually in the form of a police investigation. Major might have been okay after the criminal justice system was done with him, but it seems that what he couldn't handle was the reality in which it's not okay to sleep with your students and there are consequences for your actions.

I think that's why we call this site "Bad Love." We know it's not love, but in many cases, the people involved don't.

[Cross-posted on ScaryNY]

Posted by ADM at 09:11 PM | Permalink