A national study finds Kentucky has the second-highest per-capita rate in the country of inappropriate behavior between school employees and students.
The research was conducted by Terry Abbott, a former chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Education. His firm, Drive West Communications, examined media reports in every state daily in 2014. He tracked 22 cases in Kentucky last year.
Just as it is nationwide, Abbott found the problem of is mostly among male school employees. Abbott says the men were an average age of 41.
"Some people assume a lot of the teachers involved in these cases are kids right out of college almost the same age as the students they're teaching and they don't know any better. That's simple not true," Abbott told WKU Public Radio. "For the most part, these are educators who have a decade or more of experience in the classroom."
Abbott’s study also revealed that private messages through social media and text messaging were involved in 36 percent of the cases in Kentucky. He encourages school districts to strengthen their social media policies.
"School districts should outright abolish private electronic communication between teachers and individual students," added Abbott. "There's no reason for a teacher to be sending a child a text message in the middle of the night, and that's happening."
Abbott says parents have a role to play, as well, by monitoring their children’s social media interaction.
