Stories of teachers inappropriately interacting with their students have become a consistent part of the daily news cycle. Reports of such events have become so prevalent that there is now a unique tagline to describe this horrifying trend: “Cougars in the classroom.”

While male teachers and coaches have been known to make up for the majority of these problematic situations, the surge in female offenders has taken the shock of these scenarios to a new level, as we try to make sense of why this has become something of a crisis.

A recent report revealed that “25 female teachers had been arrested in 16 states in only the last 12 months.” The frequency of incidents is baffling, as is the young age of the students who are being lured into improper interactions with these trusted figures of authority.

In Tennessee, a 12-year-old victim came forward in 2023 to share his harrowing experience with a former fourth-grade teacher. After spending the night at his 38-year-old teacher’s home, the pre-teen awoke to discover the adult woman attempting to be intimate with him. As the investigation has been ongoing for several months, the teacher is now facing the possibility of being tried for 20 separate offenses.

Also on the list of offenders is a Wisconsin teacher who was discovered to be having a relationship with an 11-year-old student. The boy’s parents overheard their son talking to the woman about things that, shall we say, have nothing to do with math or history lessons, and later discovered graphic text messages between their child and the 24-year-old.

The most recent addition to this criminal lineup is a Connecticut middle school counselor who has been accused of “performing sexual acts and [lapdances] on a 13-year-old boy.” The 47-year-old married woman applied the well-known techniques of grooming the teen by giving him money and gifts, then engaging in inappropriate activities after the pair were isolated from fellow classmates and other faculty members couldn’t see what was happening.

As this abuse of power and authority by teachers over students has become rampant, we would expect to see the issue addressed with urgency — particularly by the very institutions that claim to be dedicated to the well-being of our children.

However, that has not been the case.

Though inappropriate teacher/student relationships have been a known problem for decades, it remains one that has been alarmingly understudied. In fact, almost no effort has been exerted toward the issue in 20 years.

Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos confirmed the borderline negligence of the matter by those at the highest levels of education. “In any given year,” she said, “they have failed to report thousands of these situations, and instead they’ve papered them over, and acted like it’s not an issue.”

DeVos attempted to initiate more effort under the Trump administration after she learned of a reported 523 incidents of some type of sexual misconduct within Chicago schools in 2018 alone. Her solution was to add “specific questions about such cases in the Department’s Civil Rights Data Collection.”

However, after the presidential transfer, the Biden administration made the objectionable decision to remove the questions, only promising to keep the process in place after being accused of caving to the demands of the teachers unions. Yet no new data has been reported to the Department of Education since.

The nonexistent level of interest seems to have also been confirmed in an investigation by Business Insider columnist Matt Drange. Upon digging into the heinous conduct running rampant throughout countless school districts across the country, Drange noted a disturbing pattern of “school administrators across the United States catastrophically failing to prevent abuse.” Nevertheless, he added, “No federal agency tracks teacher sexual misconduct.”

For the sake of the innocent, there must be answers to the question of why so many teachers are engaging in this type of behavior.

One avenue for trouble is teachers’ ability to bypass parents and communicate with their students through text and share personal information by granting access to their social media accounts.

Another contributing factor might be the relentless breakdown of personal boundaries between minors and adults — particularly in the classroom. Conversations about sexuality, relationships, and personal subjects, which are things now being passed through as academic “curriculum,” have become a normalized part of the school day.

In countless school board meetings, parents have expressed their frustration and outrage over the explicit material that their children have access to and the graphic assignments they have brought home, while warning of what could happen as a result of constant exposure to this type of content in their learning environment. Yet these concerns have been repeatedly dismissed.

We have warned that eroding lines between teachers and their students, even in conversation, and normalizing secrecy from parents would lead to improper adult/child relationships. Doing so would likely incapacitate the natural instincts that children use to protect themselves from unwanted contact.

Essentially, all of the things we have said would happen as a result of eliminating the protocols for what teachers can and cannot deal with when it comes to children that are not theirs are the exact scenarios playing out.

The repercussions of these failures and the ball that has been dropped in protecting children will take a lifetime for the victims to overcome.