When I was in eighth grade, I watched my science teacher sexually assault a friend. This wasn’t an errant hand brushing against a thigh or anything you could call a matter of interpretation. It was an overtly sexual act. And he wasn’t hiding it. We were in a public place with other adults around. No one said a word, including 14-year-old me.
This teacher was well known for flirting with dozens of girls. We all understood he was crossing a line. We knew it was wrong. But at the time, it felt like a thrill, a frisson of adulthood. We were so painfully naive.
These memories from my school days in 1980s New York City have been jangling around my mind amid a torrent of reports over the past year of similar, and far worse, acts involving trusted adults at schools from Seattle to Mercer Island, in communities low-income and affluent.
Two coaches from Garfield High School have been criminally charged with sex offenses involving the same student during the 2010s. Around the same time, two English teachers on Mercer Island appear to have engaged in sexual misconduct with at least three high school students. And last year, a math tutor with the student-intervention program City Year assaulted a seventh grader at Aki Kurose Middle School.
Maybe it’s easy, when you hear rumors and snippets, to shrug off such stories, to tell yourself boundaries can get blurry in relationships of any kind. But not when you read the graphic police reports and court documents, which make the nature of these transgressions brutally clear.
At Garfield, volunteer weight trainer Walter “Junior” Jones, a man in his mid-30s, began having sex with a middle-school basketball player when she was 13, according to police reports. (The girl, recognized for her athletic talent, had been tapped to work out with high school kids.) Another coach saw Jones with her at odd hours and spoke to him about “appropriate” behavior. It apparently did nothing. Now charged with rape of a child, Jones faces up to 23 years in prison. His trial is scheduled to resume Monday.
A few years later, Garfield basketball coach Melvin Hall had sex with the same student. By then, she was 17. Last summer, Hall pleaded guilty to sexual misconduct with a minor and was sentenced to nine months in the King County Jail.
Meanwhile, the student, now in her mid-20s, sued Seattle Public Schools for failing to protect her, and recently settled with the district for $16 million. That sum was a record amount, but not because the case was unusual.
At roughly the same time as the Garfield crimes, two high school English teachers on Mercer Island were engaged in sexual misconduct with several students. After this came to light, in 2023, popular and much-honored English teacher Gary “Chris” Twombley, was quietly put on paid leave. He resigned earlier this year, escaping criminal charges because, prosecutors say, his conduct was reported after the statute of limitations had passed.
Twombley had to relinquish his Washington state teaching credentials. But nothing prevents him from getting hired in another state if districts fail to do a thorough background check. And because there is no national registry for teachers credibly accused of sexual misconduct, no other district would necessarily know about his past.
It’s similar for the second Mercer Island teacher: Allegations about his behavior surfaced too long after the offenses to pursue a criminal case. But the teenager involved, now a 33-year-old woman, says their relationship, which started when she was a high school senior and continued into college, left her “in a really dark place.”
Maybe all of these guys told themselves they truly cared for these girls. Doesn’t matter. Maybe the girls acted like they wanted the attention. Still doesn’t matter. The power imbalance is such that no kid really has agency. Twombley, for instance, threatened to fail a student if she refused to come to his office, alone, to recite a poem, according to a damning story co-written by InvestigateWest and the Mercer Island Reporter.
When these issues have come to public attention in the past, the teachers union has been iron-fisted in its protection of educators under question. In 2003, Seattle Times reporters sought information about teachers and coaches accused of sexual misconduct in the state’s largest school districts, and an assistant superintendent in Bellevue asked the Washington Education Association to sue, barring the records from disclosure.
Charles Hasse, then president of the WEA, agreed. “You give up a lot to be a schoolteacher,” he said. “There should be some privacy preserved.”
OK, thoughtful people can debate the balance between educators’ privacy and the public’s right to know. But we can agree that it should tilt toward protecting kids, rather than adults, can’t we?
The trouble is, plenty of folks work in schools — with full access to students — who are not school district employees. Such as Gregory Ward, a math tutor with the nonprofit City Year. He pleaded guilty to child rape earlier this year after assaulting an Aki Kurose seventh-grader in the bathroom of a restaurant, and filming it.
He’d been communicating with the girl by text for months prior, a violation of SPS protocols, but not City Year’s. The girl told police she’d looked up to Ward as a father figure. Sometimes she called him “Dad.”
During the rape, her mind was “all over the place,” the girl told a forensic interviewer. She could not move and was thinking, “What’s happening?”
Ward now faces up to eight years in prison and is scheduled for sentencing later this month.
None of these guys looked like anyone’s idea of a creep. They were all charismatic, some quite handsome. As with my old science teacher, the kids thought they were cool. They always do.
This miserable litany should make it clear that the problem is not some relic of an ignorant past, now solved through better awareness of the psychological wreckage left behind. Sure, cases today result more often in lawsuits and criminal charges. But the culture surrounding them remains the same, the whispers and gossip. The number of people who know.
Friends of one Mercer Island girl were suspicious enough about the nature of her relationship with an English teacher that they spied on the two leaving school together and followed them to the teacher’s home. Other staffers at the high school said they felt uneasy about an office known as “the man cave,” where raunchy jokes were standard and certain girls who hung out there with male teachers were tapped to act as their “teaching assistants,” which allowed plenty of alone time.
So dispense with the convenient fiction that these crimes are shrouded in secrecy. Plenty of people see — school staff, other kids and probably a few parents too. It’s not a matter of ignorance, something that can be stemmed through training, but of looking the other way.
