On July 20th, Fox News posted an article with the following headline, “At least 181 K-12 educators charged with child sex crimes in first half of 2022.”
The article reports:
At least 181 K-12 educators, including four principals, were arrested on child sex-related crimes in the U.S. in the first six months of 2022, ranging from child pornography to raping students.
An analysis conducted by Fox News Digital looked at local news stories week by week featuring arrests of principals, teachers, substitute teachers and teachers’ aides on child sex-related crimes in school districts across the country. Arrests that weren’t publicized were not counted in the analysis, meaning the true number may well be higher.
The analysis found that at least 181 have been arrested between January 1 and June 30, which works out to exactly an arrest a day on average.
The article notes:
The Education Department’s report, however, found that laws against the practice are varied across the states, and that while all states require prospective employers to conduct criminal background checks on educators, and most states – 46 – require fingerprinting, only 19 states require employers to request information from an applicants’ current and former employers.
Moreover, only 14 states require employers to check an applicant’s eligibility for employment or certification, and 11 require applicants to disclose information regarding investigations or disciplinary actions related to sexual abuse or misconduct.
Most churches now require CORI (Criminal Offender Records Information) reports for anyone who works with children in the church. Shouldn’t our schools be as pro-active about protecting their students?
The article concludes:
Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, called for a new national study on child sex abuse in schools.
“This is a scandal that the political Left is doing everything in its power to suppress,” he said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “The basic fact is incontrovertible: every day, a public school teacher is arrested, indicted, or convicted for child sex abuse. And yet, the teachers unions, the public school bureaucracies, and the left-wing media pretend that the abuse isn’t happening and viciously attack families who raise concerns.”
“It’s time to take this problem seriously,” he said. “I call on Congress to appropriate $25 million for a national study of child sex abuse in public schools, so victims can finally get justice and parents can have greater confidence that schools will be safe for their children.”
The Department of Education last released a report on the topic in 2004, which claimed that nearly 9.6% of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career.
Maybe it’s time to investigate teachers as well as some of the curriculum.