Hot for Teacher

We've heard of sex education but this is going too far. A spate of Mary Kay Letourneau events has rocked the New York City school system over the past few weeks.

It seems as if "NY's Smartest" have been teaching the wee ones something more than math and history...

These teacher-student couplings include:

• Rhianna Ellis, a 25 year old high school teacher who apparently bore a child fathered by an 18 year old student.
  
• Samantha Solomon, 29, who allegedly was having sex with a 17 year old student
  
• Joanna Hernandez, 27, who is accused of kissing a 15 year old boy in an empty classroom
  
• Jermaine Reed, 27, who allegedly had sex with two female students
  
• Joseph Morales, 28, who charged with lewd behavior after exposing himself to youngsters on Staten Island
  

Officials state that Reid has not returned to work since being arrested.

And the other teachers have? If Rhianna Ellis returned to class in Kid Various' high school, there'd be a raft of transfer activity of guys trying to get into her class. (Among other things.)

New York City officials are suitably outraged:

On Tuesday, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein wrote an e-mail to principals that he would "use all means at my disposal" to remove sex offenders from schools and prosecute them.

Which apparently, in most of these cases is not much.

The mayor wants to change union rules that make it difficult to fire teacher’s accused of inappropriate behavior. While the city can now remove them from the classroom, it can take years to get them off the payroll.

“At the moment, the city really has little recourse to terminate teachers who abuse their position,” said Bloomberg.

But it's not just difficult to fire teachers engaged in questionable behavior, it's difficult to prosecute them. Right now, there is nothing illegal about a teacher or administrator having a sexual relationship with a student who is 17 or older.

Ahhh. The Kid gets it now. Teachers have to be protected from the political persecution by administrators who may try to hold over them arbitrary and unreachable standards like not shtupping your students.

But just in case you thought the debauchery was confined to the teaching class or New York City, here's a fascinating piece via Interested Participant about some high schoolers in Ohio.

Four girls and one boy were arrested on Tuesday after deputies said the teens made a video of themselves having group sex.

The youths, ranging from sixth grade to 12th grade, reportedly were caught after one girl showed the sexually explicit video to two 12-year-old boys. Two of the girls charged are sisters.

"This is just beyond belief. And they're very cavalier about it and are acting like everybody's doing it," Clark County Sheriff Gene Kelly said.

... Sheriff's Lt. Russell Garman said the minors admitted to having consensual sexual intercourse and oral sex.

... They shot the tape in a bedroom at her grandmother's house, but it wasn't clear whether the grandmother was home. The girl has been living there for the past five months to care for the ill grandmother, Garman said.

"It's just (like) the Howard Stern crap they see on TV," Garman said.

Oh yes we see, its Howard Stern's fault. Where was the grandmother? Where were the parents? Where were their teachers? Ok, don't answer that. Where was anybody in these kid's entire lives to teach them that it's not ok for teenagers to be making group sex videos???

Investigators called in the children and their parents for questioning. The children were laughing and joking, Garman said. The youths didn't seem bothered when the tape was played in front of their parents and investigators.

"They weren't even embarrassed," he said.

The parents were upset.

Yeah, no sh*t. Well, we're glad that someone besides the police thought that this was not acceptable. And then there's this...

The youths participated in a trend in which they wear colored jelly bracelets to indicate their sexual experience, deputies said.

Different colored bracelets represent certain sex acts, Garman said. Black bracelets indicate the wearer is willing to have intercourse. Blue stands for oral sex, green stands for touching private parts and pink stands for kissing.

Someone can walk up to a person wearing a bracelet and break the band. The person wearing the bracelet then is obligated to perform the act represented by the color of the bracelet, Garman said.

All of this, the teachers having sex with students, the group sex videos, the bracelet sex etiquette all leads up to the most burning question facing our society:

Why wasn't any of this happening when Kid Various was attending high school???

Do you have any idea how hard the Kid had to work to get a blowjob in high school? And now you're telling him that if he was born just a few years later he could have just gone up to some girl with blue bracelet and snapped it? That the Kid could just have gotten freaky with Mrs. K in the backseat of her car during free period?

Where is the justice???

These events make a mockery of all of the Kid's effort and exertion during his high school experience. Kid various spent 4 long years slaving like the proverbial dog to get some, with scant success. And he was happy for what he got!

Kids today!

We are really devaluing the work ethic in this country.

You feelin' the Kid, Mr. Scriblerus? This is your future man. Called into the precinct in the middle of the night to watch your kids getting down on VHS. Or, worse yet, stumbling across it on the Internet.

Aside from the humour involved in these events, there are a couple of interesting legal questions brought up that the Kid will leave to the two lawyers on this blog.

Firstly, Kid Various is curious to see whether or not the female teachers are prosecuted successfully and if they are, will their punishments be as severe as the male teachers?

The law states that their crimes are equal, but are they so in reality? The Kid simply means that no matter what the law maintains, in our hearts, we treat the situations as different. A 25 year old man having sex with a 15 year old female student is a monster. But when a 25 year old woman has sex with a 15 year old male student, secretly we're like:

Heh. Heh. Go for it dude.

That's what we all thought about Mary Kay LeTourneau and that kid Vili whatever. In fact, Kid Various would go so far as to state that LeTourneau's crime was less one of passion and more of taste. She f*cked him? You got to be kidding! Man, Joe Jackson said it best.

Is she really going out with him?
Is she really gonna take him home tonight?
Is she really going out with him?
'Cause if my eyes don't deceive me
There's something going wrong around here

The other legal point the Kid would like to bring up is that, remember, the kids in the group sex video were actually arrested.

The Kid's question is "did they in fact do anything illegal?"

The article states plainly that they all were engaged in consensual sex. They were all in the same age range (although the 12 year old may have been under the age of consent - but then they couldn’t be arrested, only the older kids.) As far as the Kid knows, there's nothing illegal about taping you or your friends having sex. So where's the criminal behavior?

Symbol of the collapse of society, yes. But is it a crime?

Kid Various will leave you with this thought.

The video included a 12-year-old sixth-grade girl from Reid Middle School, two 15-year-old sophomore girls and one 17-year-old senior girl from Shawnee High School, and a 16-year-old sophomore boy from North High School.

Oh man, to be a sophomore again...