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As a teacher, I get annoyed at my students for misbehaving in ways that are clearly against the rules, particularly when they start with the excuses about the rule not being explicitly stated. “You never said we couldn’t draw mustaches on our upper lips with Sharpies to get high off the fumes.” “You never said that we couldn’t have a food fight.” “You never said that we couldn’t scratch our initials into the table.” Yeah, those are all things that should go without saying, right? I mean, someone should have taught kids somewhere along the line about basic, decent, solid, good behavior.
And it turns out that some teachers evidently need a similar lesson, forcing the actual creation of a law in Washington State …
… stating that student age is irrelevant in terms of a sexual relationship between teachers and students (in other words, 18-year-old students can buy porn, scratch tickets, and a pack of butts but can’t screw a teacher that works in their school).
Yes, the state supreme court did in fact have to rule on this. Wow.
The case involves Matthew Hirschfelder, a former choir teacher at Hoquiam High School, who had been charged with first-degree sexual misconduct with a minor in 2006. An 18-year-old choir member told police she had been involved in a sexual relationship with him.
Hirschfelder, who was 33 at the time, denies any relationship occurred. He asked a lower-court judge to dismiss the case because the girl was not a minor. The judge refused to dismiss the case and encouraged the Court of Appeals to clarify what state law said on the issue. The appeals court ruled in January 2009 that the statute did not criminalize sexual relations between students and teachers.
A few months later, the Legislature clarified the law, saying all sex between school employees and full-time registered students 16 or older is illegal.
The Supreme Court on a vote of 5-4 reversed the appeals court and said the state law was not unconstitutionally vague.
And, in a completely unsurprising reaction, Hirschfelder’s attorney, Rob Morgan Hill, felt that it all came down to wordsmithing and claimed shock at the final ruling.
[Morgan Hill] was surprised by the way the court ruled on unconstitutional vagueness, since the legal standard says a law should be written so a person of common intelligence will understand it.
The Supreme Court’s decision implies that four supreme court judges and three appeals court justices have below common intelligence because they interpreted state law differently than the five justices in the majority, Morgan Hill said.
And in an even less surprising turn of events, Hirschfelder pulled an O.J. Simpson by saying that he hadn’t had sex with the girl … but if he had, he still should have gotten away with it by the ambiguity of the word “minor.”
Hirschfelder argued that the former statute, entitled “sexual misconduct with a minor in the first degree” was not intended to criminalize sexual intercourse between school employees and registered students age 18 or older because of the statute’s use of the word “minor.”
Fortunately, Justices Debra Stephens, Barbara Madsen, Gerry Alexander, Mary Fairhurst, and James Johnson saw it differently, noting that, “Reading ‘minor’ as Hirschfelder urges – to exclude those students 18 or older – renders the words ‘registered student’ in the statute meaningless,” the decision said.
Something really scary, though, is that several other judges—fortunately a minority—saw things Hirschfelder’s way.
The dissent, written by Chief Justice Charles W. Johnson and signed by justices Susan Owens, Richard B. Sanders and Tom Chambers, argues the majority did not properly interpret state law and used the wrong statutes to make its argument, while ignoring others that would have fit the case better.
“The majority’s conclusion is inconsistent with the statutory scheme, taken as a whole, and does not, ultimately make sense,” Johnson wrote in his dissent.
He called the majority’s explanations unpersuasive and imprecise.
The dissent also criticizes the majority for rewriting a “bright-line rule.”
“We should not use the statute to criminalize conduct between two consenting adults where the Legislature has expressly provided otherwise,” Johnson wrote.
So Hirschfelder will probably be appealing the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, a body that evidently has nothing better to do than decide whether or not teachers should be engaging in sexual acts with their students.
The answer is no, nay, never.
It should not have to be written down as a law but should fall under the moral statute of common sense.
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Problem is, you can’t prosecute someone under ‘the moral statute of common sense’. So if people are going to do things that aren’t right, (which they are), it is useful in a society dependent on the rule of law for unacceptable things to make laws explicitly forbidding them.
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Personally, I agree. An eighteen-year-old is not a minor, and should not be treated as one. To me, that sets a dangerous precedent.
Most places ALSO have laws against people in positions of power having relationships with their underlings, and it is under this idea that it should be illegal to have sex with an eighteen year old student. It is not right or necessary to consider an eighteen year old student a minor, but it is entirely reasonable to say that the power differential is too great, and therefore a teacher should not have sex with a student.
Even there, it needs more explanation. No sex with your own students (those over whose grades power is held)? No sex with students in your school (Those who might see you as an authority)? No sex with anyone currently attending high school(Can’t justify this one)?
Does this new ruling apply only to High School? What about college professors and their students?
I’m not sure about this. As stated above, an 18 year old is not a minor. And, as weird as it may seem, I don’t think it should be illegal unless the student is a) underage, or b) directly under the influence of said employee. So if it’s your chemistry teacher, or the principal, or someone who has an influence on your grades, then yes, that’s inappropriate, just as it would be inappropriate for an employer to solicit a subordinate. But if you’re 18, the new 9th grade math teacher is 22, and you have no other dealings together, why should that be illegal?
That was kind of what I thought as well. It would really suck if you were dating someone, they graduated, and then returned to work as a TA at the school or something.
I have a problem legislating sexual relationships between two consenting adults as well. It’s not scary that people agreed that this was not consistent with a statutory scheme because it simply wasn’t. To me, it’s scarier that people thought it should be treated as such even though the girl was 18. Create a policy to rule out having sex with high school students if you want, but don’t encourage the Supreme effing Court to call sex between adults statutory rape just because it my fall under a different category of unacceptable behavior not yet legislated. To do so could jeopardize the lives of many other people who are not (I think) the target of your disdain. At the bare minimum there is a large amount of clarification needed here. As Alzaetia says- Would this apply to college professors? What about graduate students who are also instructors? They have power over students’ grades and may be seen as authority figures, yet they are also students. Students in the “whole school…” Would this mean an entire university? I dated and married my husband when he was an undergraduate and I was a graduate instructor. He was never my student, but he was in my department. I don’t think I exploited a power differential. I know of several such cases. If it would not apply to colleges, why not? The power issues are still in play. Most universities, or at least individual departments, have policies regarding relationships with students. You are generally not allowed to be involved with your current students. Any type of policy that would protect people from being exploited by others in positions of power in a school setting would need to outline CLEARLY situations in which a relationship is deemed inappropriate in cases not involving a minor. (Ex., the student is currently in your class, the semester is over but grades are not yet finalized, the relationship cannot begin until the time period passes during which a student can appeal that grade, you do not serve a long-term advisory role, etc.) I will throw in with Kai here when I say that legislating sexual relationships with non-minors in any setting sets a dangerous precedent and will do more harm than good.
I was definitely seeing it as a high school thing as that’s the example given. I think there is a definite need for public school teachers to set an extremely high standard for students as they are government institutions, when you think about it. As an example, my school district expressly forbids teachers from being Facebook friends with any students in the district, driving students in their personal vehicles, et cetera. Those are gray areas where professional boundaries could potentially be breached. Sleeping with students … there’s no question that it breaks professional boundaries and should not be tolerated. I just feel that it sort of insults the collective intelligence of public school teachers to have to spell this out.
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I hadn’t even thought of the college conundrum … not sure how I feel about that. I’ll have to do some thinking …
I don’t think there is any such thing as collective intelligence, unless you mean average intelligence which may not represent any individual contributing to it. Or maybe if we’re talking about actions that can only be done if everyone in a collectivity agrees to it. Sex is not such an action.
Why would you have policies explicit forbidding Facebook friending, but not sex? Surely your school district addresses this as well, unless they are assuming that all of the students are under 18, which seems like a pretty big slip-up to me.
Having a strict policy in place saying that teachers can’t sleep with students is not insulting and has nothing to do with intelligence. Some teachers are going to sleep with their students whether they’re minors or not. It happens. It’s not about intelligence- sex rarely is. Having a policy that acknowledges that some students are over 18 and that it is not okay to have sex with them despite that fact would eliminate the need for the Supreme Court to deliberate over cases like this.
Professional boundaries in the absence of written policy is an ill-defined concept as it may and will be understood in a multitude of ways.
Honestly, this is really a common sense issue. Any sex with minors is illegal, teacher or not. In the case of an 18-year old, it should be an issue left up to the school board.
We had a somewhat similar issue here, in our local district.
There was an 8th grade math teacher – fresh out of college (about 22 years old). He started to coach the varsity girls basketball tea. You guessed it, he and one of the seniors developed a relationship.
Now, she was nearly 19, her parents were aware of it, not only aware, but liked the guy a lot. They dated about the last 2 months of the girls senior year.
Over the summer, someone from the school board saw them at a restaurant and demanded “an inquiry”. The guy ended up resigning, but had no problems getting another position. The girl went on to finish college, after which they got married.
People really need to quit applying a one-size-fits-all policy to everyone.
This is why we have so many fucked up “zero tolerance” stories – especially in regards to schools and their fear of thinking, using common sense.
Is that funny or what?
I can’t type, nor formulate a coherent sentence today :(
Forgive me…
This went down at my school… 18 year old girl and a 22 year old first year teacher. It caused a lot of uproar, mainly because all the students found out about it. The parents of the girl, however, didn’t really seem to care. The teacher quit, went to teach college instead, and he and the girl are getting married this summer. I agree, 18 years old is not a minor, and under that law, it should be permissible. And while I know that teachers and students should never engage in relationships, I feel like it tends to turn out worse for the teacher than the students. Everyone always pulls the ” the teacher could hold good grades over the students head for sex” reason, but I am more of the ” the student blackmails the teacher with his/her position for good grades” logic.
This story scares me. An 18 year old can go to War for our Country and get Psyhological damage from killing people and get killed themselves. There are actually people who believe they cant have sexual relations with whoever they want? This is a School Policy issue and I cant believe my tax dollars are getting spent on this sort of Crap. If a teacher were holding grades above the head or someone in trade for sex it could be charged under an extortion law I would think. BTW He was a Choir Instructor, do they even grade choir. The guy probably wasn’t making enough money to land a girl over 18.
It is reasonable to ban sex in a power differential even if the person is over eighteen – as per in a university instructor scenario.
I don’t think either of these 18/19 year old student with 22 year old teacher scenarios are okay. If it’s going to be something serious, they can afford to wait until the term is over.
There is something creepy about developing a relationship with a student. My best hope is that they at least know each other from somewhere else, where the relationship is closer to equals, and the school setting happens to be a second.
If a student and a teacher are really that interested, they can afford to wait until that relationship is gone, and then consider starting out in a dating situation.
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