OLYMPIA…Senator Don Benton, R-Vancouver, came one step closer to protecting schoolchildren from predatory teachers yesterday when House Bill 2212, a bill regarding teacher certification, was approved unanimously by the Senate last night.

Benton’s compromise proposal, an amendment to House Bill 2212, was originally offered in a more beefed-up Senate Bill 5677, which was ultimately bottled up in the Senate Early Learning, K-12 and Higher Education Committee by Chair Rosemary McAuliffe.

“Of course I would have preferred a stricter version of the bill, but this is definitely a step in the right direction,” said Benton, member of the Senate Early Learning, K-12 and Higher Education Committee.

The bill requires the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI), for a first offense, to revoke or suspend certificates of teachers found intentionally viewing unauthorized sexually explicit material on school grounds. A second offense requires OSPI to permanently revoke a teaching certificate.

Benton’s legislation comes on the heels of allegations that Bethel Junior High School teacher Chad Maughan, 35, engaged in sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old female student. Maughan previously worked as a science teacher at North Thurston High School but resigned after the North Thurston School District filed a complaint with the state alleging that he had accessed Internet pornography from his computer at work. OSPI suspended his teaching certificate for 60 days.

“These are not the kind of people we want to give full and unsupervised access to our children, and these are certainly not the kind of people we want to be teaching our children,” Benton added. “Even teachers don’t want these kind of people in the classroom.”

Last year, after reading The Seattle Times series “Coaches who prey,” and learning that Washington state had nearly 100 teachers who had committed sexual acts with students, only to move on to other school districts without as much as a note in their personnel file, Benton worked across the partisan divide with Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles, D-Seattle, to pass the following legislation to protect schoolchildren:

• Senate Bill 6171 speeds up and requires the conclusions of investigations of school employees;
• Senate Bill 5533 requires school districts to share information regarding school employee misconduct; and
• Senate Bill 6220 outlines and clarifies misconduct reporting requirements.

House Bill 2212 now goes back to the House of Representative for consideration of amendments made in the Senate.

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For more information contact Tami Davis (360) 786-7519 or davis.tami@leg.wa.gov