Education Matters US

Eight additional female students came forward Friday to accuse an unpaid assistant track coach at Joliet Township High School of carrying on illicit affairs with them, police said.

An East Leyden High School teacher who allegedly sexually assaulted one of his female students on campus during the school day was ordered held on $750,000 bond Friday.

McQueen Duncantell, 28, who appeared briefly in a Maywood courtroom, is charged with criminal sexual assault, said Tom Stanton, a spokesman for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.

Prosecutors allege Duncantell, a first-year social studies teacher at the Franklin Park school, had multiple “sexual encounters” with a high school junior during the current school year. Some of the alleged assaults occurred in Duncantell’s classroom during the regular school day, but at a time when some of the junior and senior students had left for the day, Stanton said. Duncantell and the student were alone when the assaults occurred, Stanton said.

Editor’s note: In light of the sensational dismissal of charges against Debra Lafave, the Florida teacher who committed statutory rape on her 14-year-old student, WND is publishing the following story, featured in the current issue of Whistleblower magazine in an issue titled “PREDATORS.” David Kupelian’s exposé is one of 15 in this groundbreaking investigative report on teachers who sexually prey on their students – a hidden scandal experts say is much larger than the clergy sex scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church.

“Where is the clear, credible evidence that underage sex is always injurious? If you tell me because it is illegal, I reject that,” Marten said, according to the Associated Press.

But no sooner was she let out – early, for good behavior – than Letourneau was discovered in a car with Fualaau and re-arrested. Incensed, the judge sent her straight to prison to serve out the rest of her seven-and-a-half year sentence.

While Letourneau was behind bars, however, in March 1998 prison officials discovered that she was pregnant with another child by Fualaau. The next year, she and the boy co-authored a book – released in France, but not the U.S. – titled “Un Seul Crime, L’amour” (“Only One Crime, Love”) – for which her attorney reportedly brokered Letourneau a $200,000 advance – and 2000 saw the release of her movie, “All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story.” She was also divorced from her husband Steve.

“Students would have intercourse on the stairwells, locked classrooms, in the locker rooms,” said Ihsan Musawwir, 18, a recent graduate of Dunbar Senior High School in the District. “It was embarrassing for me to walk in on it.”

Jessica Miller, 19, who graduated in June from T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, said that for some students there, sex on campus is a popular fantasy – and sometimes a reality – particularly in the auditorium.

In today’s sexually permissive school environment, just how prevalent is the teacher-student sex problem?

Get ready for a shock. According to a major 2004 study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education – the most in-depth investigation to date – nearly 10 percent of U.S. public school students have been targeted with unwanted sexual attention by school employees.

Titled “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature,” the report says the mistreatment of students ranges from sexual comments to rape. In fact, says the study’s author Charol Shakeshaft, professor of educational administration at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., the scope of the school-sex problem appears to far exceed the clergy-abuse scandal that has recently rocked the Roman Catholic Church.

Comparing the incidence of sexual misconduct in schools with the Catholic Church scandal, Shakeshaft notes that a recent study by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops concluded 10,667 young people were sexually mistreated by priests between 1950 and 2002.

In contrast, she extrapolates from a national survey conducted for the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation in 2000 that roughly 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a public school employee between 1991 and 2000.

The figures suggest “the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests,” said Shakeshaft, according to Education Week.

Indeed, more than 4.5 million students are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade, says the report.