Cracking Down on Sexual Misconduct by Teachers : Law: O.C. educator who molested at least 5 students is one of 177 in state to have credential revoked in 1993-94.

In January, George Melvin Fairchild, 53, a teacher and coach in Fullerton district high schools for 28 years, admitted to a judge that he had a special relationship with some of his students. He had molested at least five of them.

But their side of the story surfaced months later in a lawsuit.

One alleged that Fairchild called her “B.B.” in class and told her it stood for “big boobs.” Another said he exposed himself and asked for oral sex, and several said he fondled them. One said he continued to write to her after she moved to another school district, repeatedly hinting or asking for sex. The suit alleges the harassment extended over at least 2 1/2 years.

Fairchild pleaded guilty to five counts of sexual battery, child molestation and lewd conduct with a minor and was sentenced to three years’ probation, including a $500 fine, psychological counseling and 500 hours of community service. The conviction cost him his teaching certificate.

During last year and this, 177 teachers, counselors or administrators in California have had their certificates revoked for sexual misconduct with students, ranging from sexual innuendo to sexual intercourse.

Nationally, at least 552 certificates have been revoked, probably more, given the inexact reporting methods. It’s the most common reason by far for revoking certificates, both in California and nationally, and has been over the years.

“Sometimes they are really reckless,” says Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Chuck Middleton, whose child-abuse unit prosecuted Fairchild and similar cases. “They destroy their careers. You have to think they just can’t control their appetites.”

Sometimes unreported by intimidated students, sometimes swept under the rug by embarrassed school officials, sometimes passed over by prosecutors because of their difficulty, such cases are getting more attention nowadays.

Some states are toughening their laws, including making sex between teachers and minor students a crime under any circumstance. A national data bank of teachers’ names who have lost their certificates for sexual misconduct may make it harder for such teachers simply to change states and re-enter the schoolroom.

And child advocates are calling on school districts to confront the problem squarely by warning teachers of the consequences of sexual misconduct, then coming down hard on those who transgress. Legislation pending in Sacramento will allow school districts for the first time to participate in state hearings to revoke teaching credentials.

Then, say some education officials, unreported cases might be reported, and the problem might begin to shrink.

“We would certainly like to believe we get all the reports,” says Nanette Rufo, an attorney for the state commission that issues education credentials. Yet, she says, it’s certain that some cases are not reported.

“The school districts’ concern is to get these people out of the district,” Rufo says. “Our concern is broader; we’re concerned that they may still be licensed to teach in the state. I’m sure there are reports that should be filed that aren’t, but the size of the problem we would have no way of knowing.”

Some offending teachers are pedophiles, adults who are sexually stimulated by children. Gene Abel, a psychiatrist at the Behavioral Medicine Institute in Atlanta who sometimes works under federal grants, is researching ways of screening for and treating pedophiles.

“Generally, there’s nothing unusual about the persons perpetrating this. You couldn’t see it about them. Many of them have a lot of good traits--excellent teaching, concern about students.”

Abel recalled one 40-year-old teacher who was voted teacher of the year while he was molesting an 8-year-old girl by setting up appointments for her to come to his office alone. “He sent her an inch-high stack of love letters. He was married and had children of his own.”

Separate from the pedophiles are those teachers who become sexually involved with adolescents, and again, nothing seems to make these teachers stand out from the rest.

“It’s exceedingly common for males to be attracted to adolescent females,” Abel says. “When males are young, they’re more likely to be attracted to older women well beyond their age. As you get older, the arousal shifts. Most males are attracted to individuals who are younger and smaller than they. Now, who’s younger and smaller?

“They’re around these individuals all the time at school, and adolescent girls are constantly trying out flirtatious behavior. It should be no big surprise that adults are attracted to adolescents.”

Patrick Wayne Martin, 34 when he was arrested last year in Costa Mesa, pleaded guilty to two counts of oral sex with a 17-year-old student at Fountain Valley High School. Prosecutors said he had no previous criminal record and was well liked on campus. A stream of teachers and students testified on his behalf at his sentencing hearing.

“He looked like a real nice guy,” said Middleton, the deputy district attorney. “He looked like a typical young teacher, the type where everybody would like to be in his class. He showed a lot of interest in his students. This guy epitomizes the teacher who you’d never guess was involved in this sort of thing.”

It’s even less likely that anyone would single out Michelle Lynn Smith, 36, a home economics teacher at Kraemer Junior High School in Placentia for 13 years. Yet she faces seven felony counts of lewd conduct with a minor that prosecutors allege stem from a nearly yearlong relationship of heavy petting, but not sexual intercourse, with one of her former students, then 14 years old.

“You’d never expect a female, especially with a 14-year-old,” Middleton said. “She’s married and has kids. It’s beyond comprehension.”

The effect of molestation on the child or adolescent can be lasting and catastrophic, said Justin D. Call, a psychiatrist who directs child and adolescent psychiatry at the UC Irvine California College of Medicine.

Often children simply keep the molestation a secret or force it from their memories. The events are not discovered, or rediscovered, until adulthood. Call estimates that one in every four psychiatric patients has sexual molestation by an authority figure in his or her background.

But even when “forgotten,” the molestation has its effects, Call said.

“They are mistrustful of all authorities, all figures of power they run into. And their own sense of morality is undermined.”

In extreme cases, the child can grow up to be a molester. “What happens in a case like that is a young person’s sexual development is short-circuited. Their evolution in normal sexuality is damaged. It becomes a distortion of one’s whole personality,” Call said.

Every state declares an age below which a child does not have the legal power to consent to sex. This “age of consent” varies--in North Carolina it’s 13, in California, 18--but all laws are based on the belief that these children are too inexperienced and too easily intimidated to weigh such a decision.

“But when you talk with perpetrators who molest, they are great supporters of children being treated as equals,” Abel says. “They take the position that anyone can decide what he or she wants to do.

“They say to themselves, ‘Well, you know she’s just asking me to get involved, she wants me to teach her all about sex, and after all, she’s flirtatious.’ But they never check this reasoning out with anyone else. They keep it a secret to themselves.”

Succeeding encounters without being caught often embolden molesters to the point of recklessness, Abel says. “Eventually they think what they’re doing is fine.

“When they’re first questioned, or first arrested, it’s startling. They’ll just tell you these preposterous explanations--she initiated it or she should have refused--and you’ll say, ‘This guy’s a nut.’ For the first time, they’re checking out their distortions.”

One of the nation’s busiest investigators of classroom offenses is Edward F. Stancik, whose office, special commissioner of investigation for the New York City School District, was created 3 1/2 years ago in reaction to patronage scandals. A former New York County assistant district attorney, Stancik is independent of both the city’s school board and mayor.

Stancik says the teachers he has investigated fall into categories.

“Some are predators. They know which students are vulnerable. They look for kids with trouble at home, who don’t have positive role models in their lives, who might be flattered by the attention. They target them and continually get themselves in relationships.

“Sometimes relationships start off innocently, and after a while something’s going on. I think there are those who simply get in over their head and find themselves in a situation they hadn’t planned on.

“And some do it just out of lust.”

Victims vary, too. According to Abel’s research, in child-molesting cases not involving touch, 99% of the victims are girls, but if touch is involved, 62% of victims are boys. Yet almost all victims who report being molested by their teachers are girls. That’s because it’s expected that “we protect girls,” Abel says. “We don’t protect boys. They’re supposed to be little John Waynes.”

Most complaints are made to school authorities, and what happens after that can vary. California state law requires that “any child care custodian” who “knows or reasonably suspects” that a child has been “a victim of child abuse” must immediately report it to a child protective agency, which usually means the police.

But this does not always happen, says Middleton. “Historically they try to deal with them in-house, ship them to another school, maybe they’ll be OK. Sometimes they try to think of ways not to report, and that’s where they get themselves into trouble. They mix administrative policy with the law.”

The Fairchild case was an example, according to Middleton. There had been previous complaints, and school authorities reacted by transferring Fairchild to another school, Middleton says. When the latest outbreak of complaints occurred, school officials tried to handle the matter themselves and never did report the complaints to law enforcement authorities.

Part of the reason, Middleton suspects, is a seeming conflict between California’s education regulations and its criminal law.

Education regulations require that such cases be reported to Sacramento for administrative action only when the district has firsthand information about sexual misconduct, such as a statement from a victim, witness or perpetrator. But criminal statutes require educators to immediately report any suspicion of sexual misconduct to law enforcement authorities.

But it’s not usually that simple, says Peter A. Hartman, superintendent of the 1,120-teacher Saddleback Valley Unified School District in southern Orange County.

“Half or more of the cases relate to an incident that happened many years ago, usually past the statute of limitations. It’s like somebody has grown up and gone into counseling and decided to go back and try to clear up their past. At that time it’s awfully late to verify what actually happened.

“It’s hard to get witnesses. Usually there are no witnesses, even in those cases that happened within a year. You have one person’s word against another. You have to balance against teachers that are falsely accused. Occasionally there are false accusations. If you’re dealing with a teacher with a lot of years with few or little complaints and none in the last four or five years, who’s generally well liked and gotten good evaluations, it’s really hard to decide in the middle of the career of this individual who to believe.”

And though there are varying degrees of sexual impropriety--from improper flirting and sexual suggestions to actual sexual intercourse with a minor--school administrators have only two alternatives in dealing with such teachers, Hartman says. “You either fire them and take their credentials away or let them keep teaching. I think there should be some intermediate discipline--suspension for a month or a year, something not so bad they lose their jobs. It’s like for everything there’s a life sentence.”

Many cases do not lead to trial, Middleton says, because “it’s a very gray and pretty wide area. These are some of the most difficult cases in our office.”

The victim’s statements must be corroborated in some way, and juries react differently in every case, he says. The older-looking and more promiscuous the victim, the more likable the teacher, the more likely a jury will refuse to convict, he says.

Middleton recalled an Orange County case that prosecutors finally withdrew as hopeless. A 13-year-old girl said the teacher had oral sex with her and once took her to a motel room for sex, but she could not remember the location of the motel.

Though convinced of his guilt, prosecutors could see the teacher “would make a very good impression, because he had a lot of support (among teachers and students). He had denied it all the way down the line. He was a good-looking guy, studious, the educator appearance. And she (the victim) was going to have problems with credibility on the stand. She couldn’t remember things and was very vague about some things. Without the motel room record, we didn’t have any corroboration.”

Even without criminal prosecution, teachers can be fired and their credentials revoked, but there are limitations. To start with, says Hartman, it’s expensive. Holding hearings to dismiss a teacher can cost a school district as much as $100,000 in legal and administrative costs. State authorities who issue and revoke credentials have only one investigator and depend mostly on the reports of other agencies.

And under state law, persons vocationally licensed by the state, including teachers, can wait a year, then apply for reinstatement of their licenses. Since July, 1990, four educators convicted of felonies--having sex with underage students--have had their credentials reissued. A bill now pending in Sacramento would plug this hole, forbidding recertification of educators convicted of felony sex offenses or felony drug offenses involving minors.

Revoked credentials have not kept some sex offenders out of the schools. Moving to another state and applying for a teaching credential there could reopen the field for a disciplined or even convicted sex offender. Communication between states and checking of references has been lax in the past, says Douglas F. Bates, an attorney for the Utah State Office of Education. “It was so unwieldy to trade information among the states,” Bates says. “There was just a general lack of timely information about people who should never have access to kids.”

The answer to this, authorities hope, is a clearinghouse formed by the National Assn. of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification, for which Bates is legal adviser. Formed in the late 1980s, the clearinghouse has finally reached agreement with education authorities in all states on reporting the names of teachers whose credentials have been revoked for any reason. The association now is trying to persuade Canadian authorities to join the clearinghouse.

Under the agreement, each state provides and updates information from its own records. Then the composite lists are distributed to all states monthly. But the system is still imperfect. Though requested to specify the reasons for revocation--sexual misconduct with children is the biggest category--some states refuse to do it. Others lump their sexual misconduct cases with others in the miscellaneous category. Some states have reported no revocations at all.

“You get underreporting at all levels,” Bates says. “Teachers are often allowed to resign if they’ll just leave for good.”

“I think the hesitancy to report is common,” says Stancik. “It’s sort of a natural phenomenon in bureaucracies generally. The temptation is to try to avoid a problem. Many times administrators want to sweep it under the carpet rather than risk embarrassment for the schools.”

Changes are afoot, however. In California, legislation is pending that would require the results of hearings into teacher misconduct to be more thoroughly documented and available to the public. Legislation would also do away with the requirement that complaints must be from firsthand sources, and would allow school districts to participate in state hearings.

In Utah, where anyone 14 or older can legally consent to sexual intercourse, a recent law makes a special case of persons in a “position of special trust in relation to the victim,” teachers and counselors specifically. In effect, there is no age of consent in these cases. For a teacher to have sex with a student who is not an adult is a felony, regardless of consent. Punishment can range from five years to life in prison.

A task force in New York City is studying ways to prevent sexual misconduct among educators, but some strategies are already apparent, Stancik says.

“For actual employees, you have to make perfectly clear that the system won’t tolerate this. You’ll be thrown out and prosecuted. I think you will deter cases if you do that.

“And you have to tell administrators what you expect of them, specifically. If they have evidence, they are to report it to the appropriate law enforcement authority immediately. And the system should make it clear that if you don’t do that, disciplinary action will be taken against you. . . .

“Most of the principals we’ve dealt with, especially since the requirements have been published here, do report now.”