Diane Cherchio West

This one’s just a little crazy. Diane Cherchio West was a Bayonne, New Jersey schoolteacher. She … well … I don’t even know how to explain this one, I’ll just quote:

Despite indications of misconduct and at least one request that she be fired, a woman impregnated by a student was able to work as a teacher and guidance counselor in the Bayonne school system for two decades, according to a published report.

Even after being accused of statutory rape in 2001 by a teen friend of the son she had with the student, Diane Cherchio West ultimately was allowed to take early retirement and was given a farewell party, The New York Times reported in Tuesday’s newspapers.

By then, she had divorced the one-time student.

She pleaded guilty in 2005 to sexually assaulting her son’s friend, who had moved in to her home.

That friend, Christopher Castlegrande, is now 21. He sued West, the Bayonne district, and administrators in 2004, accusing them of failing in their responsibilities to protect him.

West settled for $400,000 last year, according to court records, but the remainder of the case is pending.

You really have to wonder what on earth her school system was thinking, but maybe 2001 was a simpler, gentler time, when schools had a tougher time believing teachers slept with students. Maybe.

Or maybe not:

Early in her career, she was seen fondling a 13-year-old boy at a school dance, school personnel later told investigators.

“Diane has a thing for young boys,” the principal at the time, Daniel Doyle, said he recalled being told, according to court records reviewed by The Times. In the statement, he said he wrote the superintendent that she be fired and was surprised to see that in the fall she was a guidance counselor at the high school.

“I accepted it as a political maneuver,” Doyle told the newspaper.

The superintendent who transferred her said “That’s a very serious matter, and I would have treated it that way if I had been informed of it,”, but it’s tough to tell how people didn’t know that something was up:

At the high school, she supervised an 11th-grader, Steven West, became pregnant by him and married him after he graduated in 1985, The Times said.

Mayor Joseph Doria told the newspaper that he and others knew that the then 31-year-old had married a former student but did not seem to notice that the child, Steve Jr., was born while the father was still in school.

“No one bothered to do the math,” Doria said.

This one I think takes the cake. I’ve come across a lot of bizarre stuff while being the admin for this site, but yeah, this one’s the strangest. Most of these cases boil down to a woman being an idiot, but this one strikes me more as a story of a school district being criminally negligent. I thought nothing would surprise me anymore, but I was apparently wrong.

This story is so incredible it’s even made New York Times (although it is kind of a local story for them).