THREE R's NOT XXX

January 05, 2012 | Daily Republic
Earning an F in plea bargaining
by Kelvin Wade

I don’t quite get the plea deal given to former Rodriguez High School teacher Felicia Killings.

Killings, 27, plead no contest to a single charge of having sex with a 16-year-old student. She’d faced five felony charges alleging she’d had sex multiple times with the boy between March and October 2009 at her Vallejo apartment.

Under the terms of the plea bargain, she will receive 30 days of house arrest and have her felony conviction reduced to a misdemeanor if she stays out of trouble. She also won’t have to register as a sex offender.

Residents just saw the former vice principal of Cleo Gordon Elementary School, Christopher Vargas, sentenced to eight years in prison for two lewd acts against children. Vargas will no doubt have to register as a sex offender when he’s eventually paroled from prison.

Obviously the cases are different due to the ages of the victims. The law treats sex crimes differently when the victims are younger or older than 14. This reflects the obvious difference in maturity of the victims, plus it takes into account the depravity of the perpetrator. While they’re both illegal and the abuse of power may be the same, there’s a difference between sexual contact with a 16-year-old and a 10-year-old.

But still, if Felicia Killings were Fred Killings who had sex with a 16-year-old female student under similar circumstances, would Fred be offered the same deal?

Of course we as a society look at it differently.

Whenever a case of a female teacher having sex with a male student is in the news you’re bound to hear men say things like “I wish I’d had a teacher like that.” When we hear of a case like this, we tend to give it a nod and a wink and blow it off. After all, teenage boys are hormones with legs, right?

But why do we see it differently? While teenage boys may fantasize about liaisons with older partners, why do we assume that teenage girls don’t? One thing we know for sure is that for the most part, 16-year-old girls are more mature than 16-year-old boys. But still we view a male perpetrator as a pervert predator and a female perpetrator as a hottie.

We’ve got to focus on age difference and teacher-student difference, not gender.

I’m not saying Killings should be shipped off to prison for eight years like the former Cleo Gordon vice principal. In many states, including Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Alabama and others, the age of consent is 16. If Ms. Killings had done this in Kansas, for instance, she might’ve lost her teaching job but she would have broken no law.

What kind of message does a sentence like this send to other teachers? What confidence does it give to parents who send their kids to school to learn?

I don’t know the victim in this case. Maybe he’s high-fiving his friends about it. Maybe it hasn’t affected him in a detrimental way. I have no idea.

But this is about a teacher crossing a line that she should not have. And with a violation of the public trust like this, gender shouldn’t matter.

There should be some kind of punishment that doesn’t seem like a nasty wrist slap. There should be something that acts as a deterrent. Nobody wants teachers trolling their classrooms for dates. Peace.
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ADDITIONAL NOTES: Haven't seen the Cameron Diaz movie but it was promoted to appeal to that typical teenage boy fantasy. I know the deal. I thought Mrs. McLester was hot back at Armijo. Everyone could probably think of some teacher they had a crush on. That's normal. Not normal for teachers to make moves onn their students.

We can't just blow off these incidents. It's not always some young teacher and a high school boy. Sometimes it's special needs students. Sometimes it's children as young as 12 or 13. We've got to do what we can to draw a bright line between teachers and students that is not to be crossed. And when you have cases where the teacher crosses that line, there has to be real consequences.