A teacher who advises colleagues on how to avoid affairs with students was caught having sex with a teenager in the back of her car.
Courtney Bowles was found by a police officer naked lying on top of the boy, who was also completely naked, from her school in Colorado.
A partly consumed bottle of vodka was also found in the car with the couple.
Her student lover initially said he was 20 years old - but later admitted he was 16.
Bowles,31,was employed at his school as a teacher's instructional coach. It was her job to trains teachers on how to maintain a professional distance from students.
OK, I'll go for the low-hanging fruit first: this woman should not be having sex with an underaged boy, whether or not he was a student at her school.
And while doing that is bad enough, everyone else who writes about that story will attack that angle. You--my readers--come here expecting more than that, and I hope not to disappoint. So now, the second problem I have with this story:
Why does this school have an "instructional coach" whose job it is "to train teachers on how to maintain a professional distance from students"? If there is such a problem at this school--besides this particular woman--why the heck isn't the school administration doing anything about it? And how did so many teachers become clueless about maintaining a professional distance; was that not covered in their credentialing classes?
There's a lot more wrong in this story than just a teacher's doing a 16-year-old.
5 comments:
that would probably have been a more interesting in service than the one on cultural sensitivity.
I really don't know how you teachers deal with this. I don't think I could sit through a lecture about the obvious or cultural sensitivity training.
You crack me up! I love how you point out what should be obvious to everyone. Most people probably don't get past the "teacher has sex with student" story to see how absurd it is to have someone working under that job description.
Another thing thats wrong with the article is that it was her job "to *trains* teachers. I hope she *pulled
* no punches.
But yes . . .the thought that teachers would need training to avoid having sex with their sstudents is *
appalling*.
I can't help it ... this story brings to mind a piece of stupidity that our school engaged in several years ago.
Someone got the notion to put a ginormous rock in the corner of the student parking lot that faces a busy street. They named it the "pride rock", and the idea was that students could use it to express their school spirit. A secondary goal was to curb vandalism to buildings by providing an approved place for students' creative expression.
It might have been one thing if they had simply deposited the rock on the ground, but someone was apparently concerned that it would be stolen ... so they poured a bed of cement and embedded the base of the rock in it.
It didn't take long for the students to take advantage of their creative outlet. Not much pride was displayed, though. Apparently it fell on the football coach to paint over each new obscenity, each phallic image, and each insult to the school that appeared on the rock (which I think given his gung ho school pride may have been his brainchild in the first place). So, pretty much every new dawn saw him adding a fresh coat of paint! Since I had to drive past the school at the beginning of every school day, I got to witness the daily transformation of the rock.
The tipping point came when a teacher had an affair with a student, and it made all the local headlines. The rock sported the line: "Way to go, Mr. (teacher's name)!!!"
The following morning, as I drove past the school, I saw the coach and a team of workers with a jackhammer removing the rock from the cement bed. Later in the day, it was gone. I wondered where they had disposed of it, but didn't give it a whole lot of thought ... just marveled that it took them so long to take it down and restore a pair of parking spaces.
Later that spring, as I was walking around the gravel path down behind the school, I spied a flash of bright blue from a tangle of brush nearby. It amuses me that it is lying under blackberries and weeds, waiting for some future grounds maintenance worker to discover.
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