This week’s (second) female school teacher busted for allegedly having sex with an underage male student is 2012 gold-star regional teacher of the year, Darcy M. Smith.
Smith, 41, was most recently a teacher at McMicken Heights Elementary School teacher in an outlying suburb of Seattle, reports local ABC affiliate KOMO-TV.
Police say the prize-winning teacher had a lengthy sexual relationship with a boy she had taken into her home.
The boy was just 12 when he moved in — back in the fall of 2008. He was recuperating from some unspecified injury at the time. His mother agreed to let him move in because Smith’s home was closer to his school.
The affair appears to have begun roughly two years later. Years of sex allegedly ensued.
When Smith was named the 2012 regional teacher of the year, the relationship was still going strong, investigators say.
Smith had been the boy’s sixth-grade teacher.
The unidentified male, who is now an adult, first reported the sexual relationship to police in May 2014.
Before Smith took the boy into her home, he explained, she had taken a shine to him — bombarding him with gifts and attention.
He also told police that sex was most frequent on occasions when Smith had been drinking alcohol.
The unidentified male told an investigator “said he was a boy, thought it was cool,” according to KOMO-TV.
“Smith told him not to say anything and made him promise not to tell,” the detective also wrote. The teacher “said she would go to jail and be in big trouble if he told.”
Prior to her arrest, Smith had been local hero celebrated for her work with students from difficult backgrounds.
Teachers are required “not merely to enrich the lives of our students academically,” the teacher wrote in a 2013 essay published by the local school district, notes the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
“We do not always know what role we are fulfilling for a child at any given moment,” she wrote, “but it is important to remember that we have a moral obligation to fill these roles when we can.”
School district officials placed Smith on paid administrative leave in August.
She faces three criminal counts of third-degree child rape.
She has been a teacher in the Highline school district since 2001.
The gloomy state of Washington is among America’s hottest hotbeds for teacher-student sex tales.
Who could forget Meredith Powell, a then-24-year-old math teacher at Lincoln High School in Tacoma? (RELATED: Behind The Math Class Door: High School Teacher Admits To Classroom Sex With Two Students)
Powell was charged with engaging in oral sex and other sexual acts with at least three different teenage students. “You’ll do anything?” Powell asked one student seeking math help, court documents say. “Anything,” the teenager assured her, continuing the sleazy porn dialogue. With that, the boy said, Powell reached over to unzip his pants. Then, she grabbed his penis. “This stays between us,” Powell allegedly said. (RELATED: UPDATE: Math Teacher’s Classroom Sex With High School Students Featured Bad Porn Dialogue)
Just last week, Stephanie McCrea, a drama and English teacher at Evergreen High School in Vancouver, Wash. was arrested for having sex with a teenage male student. McCrea, 35, and the unidentified male student allegedly had numerous encounters in McCrea’s office at school. They would meet several times each week in the morning before the school day started and after drama practice. They would make out. McCrea performed oral sex on the boy right there in her office, cops say. (RELATED: Female English Teacher Promised 15-Year-Old Boyfriend They’d Be Together FOREVER)
And, of course, the pioneering superstar icon of all teacher-student sex is a resident of The Evergreen State. Former Seattle-area elementary school teacher Mary Kay Letourneau molested her 12-year-old student Vili Fualaau in the 1990s, had a couple kids with him, spent about six years in jail, then married Fualaau in 2005 — in a ceremony at a winery covered exclusively by television show Entertainment Tonight.
Last year, Letourneau, now fiftysomething, was booked into the King County Jail in Seattle on a misdemeanor arrest warrant. (RELATED: Legendary Student-Banging Teacher Mary Kay Letourneau Has Been Arrested Again)
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