Former employees of Florida high school accused of sex with students
By Barbara Liston
ORLANDO, Fla. (Reuters) - Authorities in Jacksonville, Florida, said on Wednesday they are investigating allegations that three male employees of a local high school were having sex separately with three different female students.
Jacksonville police are investigating a former dean of students, a former math teacher and a former part-time football coach at Westside High School over the allegations, according to reports by Duval County Public Schools. The three men either resigned or were fired this year in the course of investigations, the reports said.
Allegations against the math teacher, Kenneth Anderson Jr., and the coach, Clarence Thomas, who is also a Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office corrections officer, were validated by the Florida Department of Children and Families, the reports state.
The offices of the Jacksonville Sheriff and the state prosecutor confirmed they have active investigations in progress.
Last year almost 800 U.S. school employees were prosecuted for sexual assault, about two thirds of them men. School districts are increasingly moving to ban private social media contact between teachers and students, sometimes in an effort to prevent inappropriate relationships.
The school investigation concluded there was substantiated evidence supporting the allegations against Anderson, Thomas, and Ernest Timmons, the dean, according to the school district reports.
Investigators are trying to find out whether any other school employees knew about the sexual activity and failed to report it, Duval County Public Schools superintendent Nikolai Vitti said.
"To have three separate incidents in one school is shocking," he said, adding that some employees acknowledged they had suspicions. "Logic tells me other people knew about this."
Anderson's lawyer declined to comment. Efforts to reach the other accused men or their lawyers were not immediately successful.
The report on Thomas states that he confessed to investigators to having a sexual relationship with an underage student. Timmons denied the allegation to investigators, and Anderson declined through his lawyer to make a statement, according to the reports.
The case began in April after an 11th grade girl confided to a female teacher that she had sex with Anderson in January and February in his car in a park, the reports said.
The student also told the teacher about a 12th grade girl who had been having sex with Timmons for two years, and another 12th grade girl who was having sex with Thomas, according to the reports.
(Editing by David Adams and Mohammad Zargham)
