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The English teacher: She's 37, has a family - and had sex with a student

A teacher in the Philly area, on probation for having sex with a male student, talks about what led her to that indiscretion.

THE FOG went unnoticed at first, creeping into the English teacher's classroom slowly, year after year. It dulled her passion for teaching and clouded the connection she'd made with students in her younger days. Eventually, it made her lose sight of herself.

Amid the fog, one 16-year-old student began to shine like a beacon. To hear her tell it, he had a cutting intellect, different from the teens she'd taught before. He could be cruel to her in front of his classmates. He kept her on her toes.

Somehow, the boy reignited a passion in the English teacher - the wrong passion - and it only led her further into the fog. She was a mother, a wife. And she had sex with the student on more than one occasion in recent years.

"There was this element of the fantastical, of leaving your life for a little while: the mopping, and the cleaning and taking care of children. You have this boy telling you you're Aphrodite, that you're beautiful," the 37-year-old woman said.

"The lines got blurred. I've had boys hit on me before. It took a lot for me to slip into that. It wasn't just like I decided I'm going to do this 'cause I'm attracted to this boy."

The Philly-area English teacher, who spoke with the Daily News on condition of anonymity, remembers the headlines surrounding her case. She has followed similar cases nationwide of female teachers charged with sexual crimes against their students.

Her story is more sad than salacious, she said, and she thinks that's likely true for many of the other women.

The number of female teachers sexually abusing students has risen in recent decades, studies show, but it's unclear why or by how much. One study suggests that female teachers are more apt to use social media to make connections with students. Another suggests that crimes against male students by female teachers may have gone underreported for decades because of societal attitudes.

A 2004 study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education suggested that the number of female offenders may be higher than statistics show - that there may be more situations like that of the English teacher, because "males have been socialized to believe they should be flattered or appreciative of sexual interest from a female."

Even judges sometimes get caught up in it. In April, when Lower Moreland High School teacher Erica Ann Ginnetti was sentenced to 30 days in prison for her sexual relationship with a 17-year-old male student, Montgomery County Court Judge Garrett D. Page compared her to a piece of candy.

"What young man would not jump on that candy?" Page said, according to the Bucks County Courier Times.

Still, the figure is much lower than that of male teachers reportedly abusing female students. In a 2014 study of student/teacher sexual relationships by a Houston public-relations firm helmed by Terry Abbott, former chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Education, male teachers were involved in two-thirds of all reported incidents.

But stories of female teachers prosecuted for having sex with male students - notably Debra Lafave and Mary Kay Letourneau - increasingly have grabbed headlines. They set online comment pages ablaze and often bring out the worst in locker-room humor.

Double standards have been cited in the prosecution of male and female teachers, and in the way they are described in police and media accounts. Van Halen wrote a song about it. It's a popular theme for pornographers.

"There's a tendency for society to minimize, a sense of denial that the male victim is actually hurt," said Stuart Bassman, a Cincinnati-based therapist who has worked with victims of sexual assault and testified in cases involving teachers and students. "It's not consensual and it's not a relationship."

Experts say there's a vast difference between the way male and female teachers commit their crimes. Men are more often opportunistic and strictly interested in sex; women, as with the English teacher, often get caught up in fantasy.

"I did have images of a future with him to some extent, but what the future looked like was us laying around talking about poetry," she said. "There was nothing realistic about it."

'It wasn't about power'

Even though several people - including a therapist and a probation officer - had advised her against it, the English teacher spoke with the People Paper for two hours at a diner outside Philadelphia.

She spoke candidly about her struggles, about accepting that she was the perpetrator and her student the victim, and about how she's trying to build a future with those incidents forever etched in her past.

"It definitely wasn't about power, that's for sure. I think it's about vulnerability," she said. "There was a vulnerable situation there. I never thought of a student that way, ever. I should have recognized it, teaching high school all these years. It's ridiculous that I never realized it."

The lines between student and teacher, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Education, must be sharply drawn. Gifts, text messages, inappropriate compliments and interaction on social media all blur those lines.

One passage in the department's online manual on "The Student/Teacher relationship" seems to fit the English teacher's situation:

"A teacher who is experiencing difficulties in their personal lives or are socially or emotionally immature may be particularly susceptible to the 'slippery slope.' The attention, admiration and sometimes adoration bestowed by students on a teacher can be overwhelming, particularly when a teacher is emotionally vulnerable," the department wrote - in grammatically incorrect English, ironically.

The English teacher said her fog could have been some form of midlife crisis, a void that she said opens up in some women's lives in their mid-30s or early 40s.

"It's an age when men are starting to notice the younger women and going through their own thing," she said. "You get to a point in your life - women do, anyway - where you feel used and abused. You feel like you've had throw-up from kids on your shirt for too long and you just start looking for some other kind of validation.

"Now looking back on it, I wish there was a hand that took me and grabbed me and said, 'What the f--- are you doing?' I was losing myself slowly for years before that. I thought that was pretty recognizable."

'I'm out of my fog now'

Authorities said the English teacher was sneaking away with the student to hotel rooms, to her car and even to the classroom. In retrospect, she said, she was acting out her teenage years again.

"Once I was in it, I saw the audacity of my behavior, you know, getting away with it. It's like I reverted to being 17 again," she said. "I'm just coming to terms with all of this now. I'm out of my fog now. I'm trying to figure out what the hell happened."

Her family suffered for it, she said.

"I wasn't attentive to my children. I used to put a lot of passion into my kids' birthday parties. That fizzled out," she said. "I wasn't attentive to my husband, obviously. I wasn't sleeping with him."

The Daily News agreed to withhold information about the criminal charges filed against the English teacher in connection with her relationship with the student. She was given probation and did not serve time in prison. Her husband believed that she wasn't in her right mind, she said, and stuck by her. She believes that she doesn't deserve to teach again, although it wasn't a stipulation of her probation.

"I don't think I should be given a chance," she said.

She fears that someday she'll have to reckon with her children and with her student. She knows now that she took something from him that he can never get back, something beyond flesh and bone.

"It scares me that in 10 years he will come to me and want answers," she said. "I propelled him into an adult world, into adult situations, before he was ready for it. It's just bulls---."

On Twitter: @JasonNark