State checks 7 or 8 per year

Sun., Oct. 28, 2007

Donna Blankinship Associated Press

Warning signs

There are no simple rules for determining if your child is the subject of inappropriate sexual attention from a teacher. Predators work hard to groom children so they don't tell anyone. Experts' main suggestion: Talk to your child, and be a good listener. Other things to watch for:

Time together. Be aware of time spent with a teacher. There should be no out-of-school, one-on-one meetings.

Gifts or car rides. Most experts say teachers should not be giving gifts to individual students or car rides, except for emergencies.

How your child and their friends talk about teachers. If they say a teacher is a "friend," find out more. If they joke or about a teacher's crush, or that a teacher is a "perv," don't dismiss it.

Don't keep it to yourself. If you're suspicious, talk to school officials. If the behavior indicates a crime or school authorities don't take you seriously, contact police.

SEATTLE – When science and math instructor Peter Gulsrud ended his 25-year teaching career at Shadle Park High School in 2002, he blamed mental illness and crowded classrooms for inappropriate conversations with students and what he called accidental touching of the breasts and buttocks of female students.

School officials probably thought they had heard the last of Gulsrud when his license was revoked by the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction a few years later.

But now Gulsrud is back in a classroom on the other side of the state, where he was hired by Pierce College to teach an introductory chemistry class at its Lakewood, Wash., campus.

Pierce College officials said they were unaware that Gulsrud lost his license to teach high school in 2005 but maintain that proper procedures were followed when he was hired.

Gulsrud is one of 125 teachers who lost their Washington teacher’s licenses or had their licenses suspended between 2001 and 2005 for sexual misconduct. That’s about half the Washington teachers who lost their licenses or had them suspended during that time period, but only a tiny fraction of the 65,000 teachers currently licensed in the state.

“You have to give credit to all those folks out there who make good decisions. … It far outnumbers the folks who make bad decisions,” said Charles Schreck, director of OSPI’s Office of Professional Practices.

Washington state investigates about seven or eight teachers per year for sexual misconduct. Department investigators are currently looking into 11 cases of alleged sexual misconduct, Schreck said.

“One case is too many as far as we’re concerned,” he added.

Gulsrud was surprised and a little dismayed to hear the state of Washington lists the reason his license was taken away as “sexual misconduct.”

He told the Associated Press he didn’t agree with everything that was said during the investigation and hearings that led to him losing his license but acknowledges that he has “a personal space issue.”

“I am aware now that I made some students … feel uncomfortable,” said Gulsrud, who has been in therapy ever since accusations were first made against him in 1999. “I’m more aware now of professional boundaries.”

Gulsrud said he was frank with Pierce College about his experience in Spokane. College officials said they checked his references before hiring him.

“We did call the one reference that he’d given and talked to someone at the district,” said Jan Bucholz, the college’s vice president for human resources, who said Gulsrud will not be teaching there next quarter.

State education officials say most public school teachers accused of sexual misconduct never get a second chance if the accusations are found to be credible, but a handful find their way back into the classroom by moving to another state or coming back after a suspension.

Chad Maughan became a junior high science teacher in the Bethel School District after being suspended on a pornography charge in 2003, when he worked for the North Thurston Public Schools.

Administrators in his new district were aware of his problems in Thurston County but decided to give Maughan a second chance. Just a few months after starting his new job, Maughan was caught looking at inappropriate sites on a Bethel School District computer in November 2004. He agreed to participate in a pornography addiction program.

A few months later, another teacher reported that two girls had told her their friend was having a sexual relationship with Maughan. He was arrested the next day and now is serving 34 months in jail after pleading guilty to having sexual contact with a 14-year-old female student. His teaching license has been permanently revoked.

Thanks to changes in state law about 17 years ago, it is much easier to get information on teachers’ experience and much harder now for teachers who abused students to move to another school or another state to start over.

In the early 1990s, the state education department opened its professional practices office. Applicants for teacher licenses are now required to be fingerprinted and sent through an FBI check. And Washington is now part of a national network that tracks bad teachers.

The same procedures do not apply to community college teachers, some of whom are teaching 18-year-olds who were 17-year-old high school students a few months earlier but are now legally adults.

Until recently, the distinctions between high school and college were even blurrier in Washington. Sex between teachers and high school students 16 or older was not illegal in the state. Until the Legislature outlawed such relationships in 2001, prosecutors had to prove a student-teacher relationship was not consensual.