77% of arrests were alleged crimes against students.
QUICK FACTS:
- A minimum of 181 K-12 educators, including four school principals, in the United States, were arrested due to sex-related crimes in the first half 2022.
- The charges ranged from child pornography to raping students, according to a recent analysis of news stories nationwide.
- Journalists at Fox News investigated news stories week by week for the first 26 weeks of the year, finding instances of teachers, principals, and substitute teachers as well as teachers’ aides who were involved in child sex-related crimes across the country.
- The analysis found that 153 teachers, 12 teachers’ aides and 12 substitute teachers, were arrested for related crimes, 77% of which were crimes allegedly involving their students.
SOME EXAMPLES:
- The former principal at Williamsport Area High School in Pennsylvania, Roger Weaver Freed, 34, was arrested in June and charged with having sexual contact with a student, the corruption of a minor, furnishing liquor to a minor, sexual assault, and aggravated indecent assault without consent.
- Included in the charges against Freed was the accusation that he had a sexual relationship with a male student lasting for years.
- Jamaica Gateway to the Sciences High School in New York City was the former employer of Shannon Hall, 31, who was arrested in June and charged with forcible touching, endangering the welfare of a child, and aggravated harassment.
- Fourty-five-year-old former teacher at Green Mountain Union High School in Vermont Norman Merrill was charged with production of child sexual abuse material and possession of child sexual abuse material in May. Merrill allegedly secretly video recording female students who walked past him at school and producing videos showing nude children.
BACKGROUND:
- The report comes after the U.S. Department of Education released a report titled, “Study of State Policies to Prohibit Aiding and Abetting Sexual Misconduct in Schools.”
- The report analyzed state policies that prohibit a practice known as “passing the trash,” or allowing suspected sexual predators to leave one school without any reporting and leave to work in a different district.
- Senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Christopher Rufo, called for a national study on child sex abuse in schools. “This is a scandal that the political Left is doing everything in its power to suppress,” Rufo said. “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.”
