The Ohio Board of Education met this week to decide if Nicole Long, the Toledo teacher who pleaded guilty to sexual battery, should lose her license permanently:

The Ohio Board of Education today will consider permanently revoking the license of an English teacher at Ayersville High School found guilty of having sex with a 17-year-old male student in her Defiance home.

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In exchange for Long’s guilty plea, Carson Slade, a county assistant prosecutor, recommended that she be jailed in the Corrections Center of Northwest Ohio, Stryker, instead of being sent to prison.

Long also was to forfeit her teacher’s license, be placed on probation, and ordered to attend counseling.

This is pretty idiotic:

Ayersville High School’s decision to bar a student from spring sports because of “moral infractions” related at least in part to an affair he had with one of his married teachers isn’t sitting well with an area group fighting sexual abuse.

“I think what they’re doing is outrageous,” said Claudia Vercellotti, co-director of SNAP – Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests and other church leaders.

Ms. Vercellotti said she fears Ayersville’s decision will lead teenagers who have been sexually abused to be less likely to come forward, feeling that they might be blamed or punished by people who say it takes two to tango.

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The sex between Long and the student was a crime only because she was his teacher. The age of consent in Ohio is 16.

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Even if the student had violated school codes in other ways – sheriff’s investigators interviews with his mother indicate “a little bit of juvenile trouble involving a girl” recently – the affair with the teacher should not be considered in discipline, she said.

“I suspect this student feels a tremendous amount of guilt and pain that will manifest itself in other ways over his teacher being sent to jail,” Ms. Vercellotti wrote. “I also suspect that other students have already held him in contempt in the court of teenage public opinion. He needs your help, not your condemnation.”

The student apparently had athletic scholarships offered that have now disappeared:

Sexual encounters last year between an Ayersville High School teacher and one of her 17-year-old students sent the now ex-teacher to jail yesterday – separating her from her 5-week-old baby.

The encounters, in the teacher’s living room and a Cincinnati-area hotel room in June, have cost the student opportunities to play high school and college sports, Judge Joseph Schmenk was told in Defiance County Common Pleas Court before he imposed the sentence.

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The student, who was not in court, has not been allowed to compete in high school athletics this spring because of the moral infractions associated with the sexual encounters with his married teacher. Early athletic offers from colleges have disappeared.

“This is not what I expected his senior year to be like,” the student’s mother said in a statement read in court by Defiance County Victims Assistance Director Sally King.

The student’s reputation, the mother said in her statement, is no longer that of being an athlete. Instead he is known as the boy who had sex with his teacher.

“This has been an embarrassment for the entire Ayersville community,” the mother’s statement continued, saying that at winter athletic events students from opposing teams have worn T-shirts bearing the slogan: “Our teachers are hotter than your teachers.”

Heh. I kind of call bullshit on this though, because if the kid was good enough then the offers would still be rolling in. There’s not a college coach in the country that would be pulling an offer because a kid banged the English teacher. Hell, lots of coaches would just think that made him more of a man, and thus a more desirable recruit.

My guess is that the kid was a middling prospect, the kind that is the most damaged by having to sit out a season.

The judge made a really good point that’s often overlooked in these cases:

“In addition to the harm you caused the victim, the victim’s family, and your own family, it occurs to me you hurt every other teacher out there,” Judge Schmenk told Long, adding that good teachers trying to work closely with their students may be looked at suspiciously because of her actions.

“The profession’s difficult enough,” he said.