A four-month investigation resulted in the arrest and jailing of a 39-year-old elementary school teacher named Eric Shank Van Eenige. According to Van Eenige’s public defender Sandra Bennewitz, he has taught at the Ariel Elementary Community School in Chicago’s North Kenwood neighborhood for the past decade, earning just over $85,000 per year from the Chicago…
It was the pool party seen round the world. On June 5, a number of officers from the McKinney Police Department allegedly responded to a “disturbance” or “reports of possible violence” at a pool party at the Craig Ranch North Community Pool in McKinney. It’s not entirely clear who phoned in a report or why,…
In a press release issued June 2, Acting United States Attorney John E. Kuhn, Jr. (W.D. Kentucky) announced that his office had arrested Patrick Newman, 35, and charged him with violating child exploitation laws. Prior to the announcement by Kuhn, Newman taught Social Studies at Trinity High School, an all-boys Catholic school located in Louisville,…
School officials in Alameda, California are investigating whether a teacher at Encinal High School actually offered students in his class extra credit if they took a selfie with whatever sex toys and birth control they could find in their parents’ private space. Two mothers of students in the class, Kimberly Cobene and Evangeline Garcia, reported…
On Friday, May 27, the Greenville County School District had the unpleasant task of sending a letter to the parents of 149 students at Mauldin High School and Mauldin Middle School to inform them that a district teacher had traded photographs of their children for child pornography. Meetings were scheduled at Mauldin High School so…
An Oklahoma father’s lawsuit alleges that the Hollis Independent School District in Holland, Oklahoma violated his son’s rights by not preventing sexual activity between him and his teacher, Jennifer Caswell. Some of you may have seen Caswell’s self-serving interview with Dr. Phil McGraw on May 19. The Complaint contains a number of powerful allegations regarding…
Some visual aids aren’t meant for the classroom. Last week, the investigative Web site The Smoking Gun obtained a copy of a May 18 search warrant application filed by the Newport News Police Department, seeking approval to search a white iPhone owned by Woodside High School teacher Melissa Kidd. According to the warrant application, Three…
Mariann Casados, a physical education teacher in the Mora Independent School District in Mora, New Mexico, was arrested on May 18, 2015 and charged with “a fourth-degree felony of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” According to the affidavit filed by the New Mexico State Police [see below], the girl’s mother had looked through…
In November 2011, the news broke that Claudia Tillery, a teacher at the Stephen Decatur Middle School (MS 35) in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, had been arrested and charged with a number of serious offenses, including rape of a student, unlawfully providing a student with drugs and alcohol, and sexual misconduct by a teacher.…
A new case arising out of White Oak, TX helps to illustrate not only the slippery slope of teacher-student cell phone communications, but the enormous challenges law enforcement officials face in investigating charges of digital misconduct. At the beginning of May, the news broke that an educator in the White Oaks Independent School District had…
