Oregon Schools let sex abuse slide

[ells9824]

This is one of those slow news days stories, but I found it pretty interesting having lived in the Pacific NW for a few years. The first few paragraphs are pretty telling. I perused the database,and there are several teachers listed more than once.

From Oregonlive

The charismatic band teacher charmed students and parents alike. He won music competitions and teaching honors. He worked late, coached volleyball and mentored kids.

No one realized Joseph Billera, then 30, was having sex with children.

Yet there were warning signs for years that the popular Salem-Keizer teacher preyed on his Houck Middle School students.

School officials verbally reprimanded Billera after spotting him at a band contest in 2000 with a girl sitting on his lap, a blanket wrapped around them. In 2001, parent Robert Ogan complained to administrators after seeing Billera alone with a female student at a community softball game. Later, Ogan alerted the school's principal after knocking on the door of Billera's dark, locked band room one evening to be greeted by a middle school girl.

Three years passed before Billera was arrested and convicted for raping two students and molesting two others. Three of his victims were younger than 14. He assaulted one of them after the 2001 complaints.

Billera is one of 129 Oregon educators disciplined for molesting or having sexual relations with more than 215 public school children over the past 10 years.
http://tinyurl.com/27qgjl

Oregonlive's database of reprimanded teachers:
http://tinyurl.com/2883y5

[ells9824]

A follow up to yesterday's article from OregonLive:

They call it “passing the trash,” and it’s a common policy that lets child abusers resign and move to another district. [Sounds like what the priests were doing, no?]

It would take months for the agency that licenses Oregon teachers to discipline a Salem-area teacher for inappropriately touching at least eight girls.

To get Kenneth John Cushing, then 44, away from Claggett Creek Middle School students immediately, administrators cut him a deal: If Cushing resigned, they would conceal his alleged conduct — clutching students’ waists, touching their buttocks and massaging their shoulders — from the public.

Cushing signed the pact — obtained by The Oregonian through public records requests — with Salem-Keizer Public Schools in 2004, and officials promised not to reveal the teacher’s behavior if potential employers called looking for a reference. They would attribute his departure to “personal reasons,” the document reads, and make “no reference to this agreement.”

Salem’s deal is just one of 47 similar confidential settlement agreements obtained or confirmed by the newspaper.

http://tinyurl.com/2zs9bn

http://tinyurl.com/27gwdl Cushing's entry in the database of bad teachers.