This week’s married high school choir teacher arrested for allegedly having a sex romp with a 16-year-old male student is Olivia Sondheim.
Sondheim, 25, teaches at Lynnwood High School in the suburbs of Seattle, reports The Seattle Times.
Snohomish County Sheriff’s deputies arrested Sondheim at her home on Wednesday.
Details remain very scant, but investigators say they believe the whirlwind romance between Sondheim and the unnamed student occurred last academic year.
The male teen — who was 16 at the time — was a student in one of Sondheim’s choir classes, detectives say.
“During the course of the investigation, detectives learned that the suspect and victim developed a relationship which, over time, became sexual,” a sheriff’s office statement obtained by the Times explains.
The Edmonds School District placed Sondheim on administrative leave after her arrest. It’s not clear if the leave is paid or unpaid. In most cases, taxpayer-funded teachers on leave are paid despite not working.
At the time of Sondheim’s arrest, neither the sheriff’s office nor school district officials released her name.
A Lynnwood High School webpage which probably isn’t much longer for this world lists a bunch of choir-related dates from last year and features a message from Sondheim.
“I am excited to get to know each and every one of you,” the second-year teacher explains in the message. “I am genuinely interested in getting to know all the families that support and create the Lynnwood High School Concert Choir and Alderwood Middle School Concert Choir. Thank you for your continued support!!”
The message is signed “Mrs. Olivia Sondheim.”
Sondheim married her husband in May 2014.
The Daily Mail tracked down a Facebook message indicating that Sondheim and her husband met each other via the pair’s respective sorority and fraternity — apparently at Washington State University.
Sondheim faces a felony charge of first-degree sexual misconduct with a minor.
As of Monday night, Sondheim’s YouTube account remained accessible.
Here is the choir teacher crooning “The Rainbow Connection” from the classic 1979 movie “The Muppet Movie”:
And here is the 2015 Lynnwood High choir belting out “Stairway to Heaven”:
The state of Washington hasn’t seen the rash of teacher-student sex allegations that have plagued other states such as, say, Oklahoma and Alabama.
At the same time, The Evergreen State is home to Mary Kay Letourneau, the legendary former Seattle-area elementary school teacher who molested her 12-year-old student Vili Fualaau in the 1990s — and who practically pioneered the entire teacher-sex genre. (RELATED: Trump Foreign Policy Guru’s Sister Is Teacher Mary Kay Letourneau, Who Slept With A 12-Year-Old)
Letourneau, now 54, married Fualaau in 2005. She has had a couple kids with him.
The wedding ceremony at a winery was covered exclusively by television show Entertainment Tonight — when Letourneau was 43 and Fualaau was 22.
Letourneau first met Fualaau when he was a student in her second-grade class at Shorewood Elementary School in the pleasant Seattle suburb of Burien, Washington.
In 1996, when Letourneau was 34 and Fualaau was 12, the pair began their torrid, star-crossed sexual relationship.
The cradle-robbing teacher was arrested in the spring of 1997 when police became aware of the tryst. Then, in in February 1998, just two weeks after she left a jail cell, police found Letourneau in flagrante delicto with Fualaau in a parked car. She had several thousand dollars in cash with her, along with a passport and some baby clothes, police said. Also, she was pregnant.
During her criminal trial, at which she ultimately pleaded guilty, Letourneau gave birth to the first of her two daughters with Fualaau.
Letourneau gave birth to her second child with Fualaau as an inmate at the Washington Correction Center for Women.
The state of Washington is also home to twentysomething former math teacher Meredith Powell, who pleaded guilty to a pair of criminal counts for — police said in 2014 — engaging in oral sex and other sexual acts behind the door of her classroom with at least three different teenage students.
Dialogue of Powell’s encounters — as explained by the male students — involved banter right out of a 1970s porn flick. (RELATED: Math Teacher’s Classroom Sex With High School Students Featured Bad Porn Dialogue)
“You’ll do anything?” Powell asked a student desperately seeking to improve his math skills, according to court documents.
“Anything,” the teenager assured her.
With that, the teen said in court documents, Powell reached over to unzip his pants.
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