Best Place To Meet Boys?

At a school in Alabama.

Jennifer Collins McNeill was a married 39 year old 6th Grade Teacher at Thorsby K-12 School, in Chilton County, Alabama who went after her son’s friend who was 14 years old, and whom she had met at church.

Warrants filed in Chilton County Circuit Court show that Mrs. McNeill was charged with six counts of second degree rape and two counts of second degree sodomy with a juvenile male under 16 years of age, but older than 12, between April 10, 2012 and June 28 of 2013.  Court records indicate she was released from the Chilton County Jail Saturday, August 17, 2013 after posting $160,000 bond. She is due for arraignment March 10, 2015.

Jennifer Collins McNeill, 39, was a 6th-Grade teacher and cheerleader team sponsor in Thorsby, AL when she sexually abused a student at the school where she worked. The Chilton County District Attorney has charged her with with six counts of second degree rape and two counts of second degree sodomy for different incidents with the same victim, who was aged 14 at the time.

According to research performed by a former chief of staff of the U.S. Department of Education, Alabama has the nation’s HIGHEST per capita rate of sexual abuse by school system employees.

Terry Abbott, who owns Drive West Communications, a Houston, Texas-based Public Relations firm, counted a total of 781 sexual abuse cases in schools throughout the United States in 2014. Although only 25 occurred in Alabama, when compared to the population, the number of cases ranks the state #1 in the United States for Predatory Sexual Misconduct by Teachers & School System Employees.

Mr. Abbot was Chief of Staff to Secretary of Education Rod Paige in 2001 during George W. Bush’s first term as president.

In 2014, he and his team tracked every available news report of teacher-student sex in the United States, every day. He admitted that his methodology was imperfect, but also acknowledged that there is no federal database to collect information, and no uniform federal law prohibiting such behavior. For example, it’s illegal in Alabama for any school employee to have a sexual relationship with a student younger than age 19. But in Wyoming, as long as the student is 16 or older and consents to the relationship, it’s not a crime. And in Michigan, all such relationships are illegal, regardless of the student’s age.

“In some cases, educators are committing heinous crimes involving children throughout the country and getting very little, if any, real punishment for it. You turn around and find a similar case in another state and find the judicial system has thrown the book at the educator. In a state where it’s not against the law for a teacher to have a relationship with a student of a certain age, obviously you wouldn’t have as many of those cases reported because it’s not a crime.”

Extrapolating the data, he found that, based upon the United States Census Bureau estimated population for 2014 (4.85 Million), the rate of such crimes was one for every 193,975 Alabama residents.

For Cases Per Capita, he found that Kentucky, Louisiana, Vermont and Mississippi were the rest of the nation’s top five worst offending states for Teacher-on-Student sex.

For sheer numbers, Texas had the highest rate, with 116 of 781 accusations and convictions. “Alabama is the 23rd most populous state in the country, but was 9th in the most of these cases in 2014,” he said.

Mr. Abbot has strong ties to Alabama, having been born and worked as a Reporter there, and later served as Press Secretary to Guy Hunt, the state’s first Republican Governor since Reconstruction after the Civil War. He was also Campaign Manager for U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions’ first campaign, and several other politicians.

Acknowledging that some adopt a Libertarian notion that the age of consent is a factor in Teacher-Student sexual relationships, and ought to be allowed, he noted that is actually a violation of a sacred relationship.

“Teachers have authority over children every day, so it’s very important to protect that relationship, and any teacher who abuses that authority and takes advantage of a child in the classroom, that should be considered a serious crime. I’m a parent, and we send our children to school every day to be educated. We don’t send them there to be sexually assaulted. An educator’s first and most important priority ought to be the safety of every child in that building.”

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More detailed news coverage of the scope and nature of the problem in Alabama may be found here.

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Maybe not so hot for teacher, anymore.