Classroom confidential

Following a number of high-profile sex abuse scandals, high schools across the country have begun carefully policing teacher-student relationships. But is this new vigilance keeping the most committed teachers from doing their best?

By Sarah Karnasiewicz

Read more: Scandal, Crime, Education, Sex, High School, Teachers, Pedophilia, Sexual Abuse, Life

Illustration by Mignon Khargie / Salon.com

April 27, 2006 | When I was 17, I fell in love with writing -- and with the middle-aged man who taught me English. It was my senior year at boarding school and I was nursing wounds from a summer crush on a college guy. Unlike the tattooed lout who'd broken my heart, Mr. L wore wrinkled khakis and faded Oxford broadcloths and had tousled hair that was perpetually damp and smelling of soap, as though he'd just come in from a run.

And Mr. L noticed me. Unlike the lout, he seemed to recognize some potential in me, something more than curly hair and cleavage. That semester, I began a routine I still observe: rising early in the morning to write, alone among the humming machines in the dark computer lab. I thrilled when Mr. L praised my short stories and read them aloud to the class; wrote notes on the back of my assignments, peppered with both professorial advice and allusions to his own young romances; urged me to keep working. He humored me when I found excuses to visit his office. Some afternoons, when class was over, he'd walk the hall with me, his hand momentarily lighting on my shoulder.

I was hardly alone in my adoration. Mr. L had a reputation as a heartbreaker , and it was impossible not to notice his female students' tendency to linger outside his classroom door. And though they didn't share the same last name (how cool!), I knew that Mr. L had a wife -- a bright, lovely woman with dark cropped hair and doe eyes like Ali McGraw's, who taught sophomores. No matter. My infatuation with him may have been just a lark, but my striving teenage heart loved Mr. L for letting me believe that I might one day write my way into his life -- or if not his, someone's just as worthy.

Mr. L no longer teaches at my high school, but even so, I'm not about to reveal his name. All in all, beyond a vague mutual chemistry, nothing untoward transpired between us; in fact, maybe more than even I would like to admit, this story -- and especially my memory of it -- is so ordinary as to be the stuff of clichi, a textbook schoolgirl crush cut from coming-of-age novels and countless Hollywood scripts.

But in many school districts today, for Mr. L to behave the way he did with me would be to risk his teaching career and his reputation. Administrators and school boards, spooked by a spate of high-profile school sex scandals and fearful of lawsuits, have begun cracking down on student-teacher relationships, despite charges from critics that they are succumbing to unwarranted sexual hysteria. This new censoriousness may protect students from inappropriate behavior, although the question of whether abuse itself is on the rise is hotly disputed. Many teachers and educational advocates worry that such changes also prevent teachers from reaching out to students -- and ultimately create a stifling climate that gets in the way of engaged education.

Schools, particularly universities, began the thorny task of policing student-teacher relationships decades ago. But the legislative turning point didn't come until the mid-1990s, when the Supreme Court decided in three separate cases that under Title IX (the educational amendment that prohibits sex discrimination in any federally funded education program or activity) schools districts are financially liable for sexual harassment -- whether an incident occurs between two teachers, two students or a teacher and a student. At that time, most universities already informally discouraged intimate relationships between instructors and students, but in the wake of the court's decision, schools began drafting official disciplinary policies to address such situations. By 2003, the University of Michigan, for example, had adopted a code that forbids romantic relationships between faculty members and any student with whom they have a supervisory relationship, and requires faculty to report any other relationship with a student to a supervisor. Similar standards were in place at dozens of other schools, including Yale, the University of California and Ohio Northern University. Since then, even more colleges, including Iowa State, Syracuse University and the University of New Mexico, have taken relationship bans one step further, outlawing romances between all faculty and students, regardless of their academic relationships, ages or mutual consent.

But now, laws governing student-teacher behavior are filtering down to the high school level, as a string of high school sex-abuse cases -- a number of them involving female teachers, such as Sandra Beth Geisel and Debra Lafave -- have led school officials to take a harder line on fraternizing. Currently all states have laws mandating background checks for public school employees and in most cases an additional check takes place every three to five years when teachers come up for recertification. Until recently, however, other than including a boilerplate sexual harassment policy in school handbooks, requiring basic ethics training upon hiring new faculty, and instituting a liability-conscious ban on students' riding in employees' cars, few high schools felt the need to spell out strict regulations regarding teacher-student intimacy.

Last summer, when a Chicago public school teacher was charged with having a sexual affair with one of his students -- a liaison that was allegedly initiated through a series of e-mails -- a city school spokesman told the Chicago Sun Times that local administrators were reconsidering whether they would allow teachers to communicate with students via school or personal e-mail accounts. Soon after, Carolyn Palmer, the principal of Chicago's Spencer Academy, told the paper that she planned to offer parents the "option of receiving an emailed copy of all student-teacher email exchanges." When a Massachusetts high school teacher was arrested for sexual assault earlier this year, the Boston Globe reported that in response, area schools were devoting renewed energy to enforcing behavioral guidelines for teachers. Until then, the Boston School Department had no explicit rules concerning teacher-student relationships. But in the wake of the abuse arrest -- and following a swell of similar, highly publicized cases nation- and worldwide -- principals from Arlington, Framingham and Newton went on record in the Globe to express concern over a lack of awareness regarding "professional conduct" and raised the possibility that they might soon "creat[e] guidelines [for teachers] concerning gifts, outings, and other activities with students." In February, after a 25-year-old high school teacher in Robertson County, Tenn., resigned amid charges of misconduct, Geraldine Farmer, a member of the East Robertson school board, told a reporter for the Tennessean that the administration intended to "do everything possible" to safeguard students. "If that means new rules, we'll go there."

While concern about sexual abuse in schools may not be new, the buzz generated by the recent press attention has ratcheted up the stakes, and prompted administrators to take extra care to train new teachers about appropriate conduct and warn veterans of the strict standards. Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, confirms the trend. "There is no doubt that there has been a major heightening of awareness among school administrators and teachers," he explains. "And the message is not just no sex, it's no touching -- because there is a point at which a handshake becomes a hug, which becomes a fondle, which becomes an opportunity to cop a feel. There is always a place where the line becomes blurry and so the smart teachers just don't even go near it."

Next page: When we talk about teachers who "make a difference," they are usually not the people who barricade themselves behind their desks