I'll be honest -- I've had colleagues who have married former students.. It has always made me uncomfortable, though not necessarily acutely so. After all, when Mike and Jeannie got married, he was 30 and she was 22 -- and they had not started dating until she came to back to the school as a student teacher. I'll admit to being a little more uncomfortable with Dan and Melissa -- we all wondered how many hours after graduation he waited to ask her out, since they were openly dating within weeks of her receiving her diploma and were married about 18 months later -- and have an age gap of around 20 years. I was pleased, though, when the school I used to teach at fired our counselor when he married the class valedictorian in Vegas two days after graduation (four weeks after his divorce became final) and announced that they would be having a baby sometime around Halloween.

This situation, though, positively makes my skin crawl.

A 40-year-old high school science teacher and cross country coach who once worked in Guilford County has resigned his position and married a 16-year-old student.

Brenton Wuchae coached Windy Hager at South Brunswick High School, where she recently completed her sophomore year as one of the school's top runners. He also lives less than two miles away from the Hagers' home on Oak Island.

Wuchae married Hager in Brunswick County on Monday, according to a marriage license.

Hager's parents, Dennis and Betty Hager, said they did all they could to keep the couple apart after noticing a deeper-than-usual friendship forming between them. The parents said they tried to intervene by talking to the coach, going to school officials, pleading with police and sheriff's office detectives, even other teachers and students at South Brunswick.

But the Hagers say they reluctantly signed a consent form allowing their daughter to marry her coach.

Clearly, this relationship blew right through any and all student-teacher relationship boundaries, and he had to go. I know that this would have been a firing offense in my district, which has a strict "no dating the students" policy in place -- even if the student is 18 and the employee does not have any sort of authority over the student. We had a 22-year-old teacher from an elementary school let go a couple of years ago for dating an 18-year-old girl he knew from church, because she was still a student two months from graduation at one of our high schools. I don't want to even think about the sh!t-storm we would have if one of our teachers actually married a current student.

H/T Interested Participant

Posted by: Greg at 02:04 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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