By Tommy Witherspoon and Wendy Gragg

Tribune-Herald staff writers

Alan Eugene Slates had a “fun room” for kids at his home that included toys, movies and video games. He became friends with their parents, buying them movie tickets and other items not readily affordable to the mostly lower-income families.

Slates also liked to molest little children.

The longtime teacher’s proclivity toward children cost the Waco school system $550,000 in a civil lawsuit in July 2002. However, the abuse cost his 20 young victims and their families a lifetime of grief and, in most cases, shame.

Jason Scott Hayes, a handsome, personable coach, liked teenage girls, so he got jobs teaching and coaching girls’ basketball and volleyball. His academic career ended when he was convicted of having sex with an underage girl amid allegations he was grooming many others for similar activity.

Amber Wolfshohl wasn’t much older than her students when she started teaching high school — and it wasn’t too long before rumors about her and a popular senior athlete in Brady began circulating on campus.

That was before she moved to Central Texas to begin teaching at Waco High School, where she again ignored boundaries that should exist between teacher and student. That led to her conviction for having sex with a 16-year-old male student.

The three are among at least a dozen teachers, coaches and educators in Central Texas convicted of having improper sexual contact with students in McLennan County over the past two decades.

They’re also among a group who had been admonished, disciplined, reprimanded, fired or forced to resign from previous teaching jobs for inappropriate behavior with students, then were hired by other school systems, only to breach the trust of innocent young people again through additional sexual misdeeds.

“School districts who are unwilling to report this type of behavior are just passing the trash and creating mobile molesters,” says Mark Parker, a McLennan County prosecutor.

Texas Education Agency spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson says she doesn’t see reports of sexual misconduct with teachers and students on the decline.

“I think we’re hearing about more of them now because it’s out in the community more,” Culbertson says.

Now that people are more aware of the problem, they may be more likely to come forward, she says.

Still, making allegations against a respected, popular teacher is difficult, often traumatic, says McLennan County prosecutor Beth Toben. A system must be developed so the person making the allegation isn’t made to feel like the center of the investigation, she says.

“If a student wants to come forward and say this is happening, they are going against the tide,” Toben says. “We know kids want to fit in, they want to be part of the gang, they don’t want to be that kid who made the allegations against that teacher or that coach, and the minute they do come forward, what happens? Suddenly, all the focus, all the criticism is not on the teacher, it is on that kid, and what kid wants to go through that?”

The Texas Legislature tried to tighten security measures involving school employees with Senate Bill 9, signed into law this year. The law includes several pieces related to school safety, including an initiative to have every certified employee in a school district fingerprinted and undergo a national criminal history background check by 2011.

“It’s getting more stringent, and more is going to be done to catch these people before they slip through the cracks,” Culbertson says.

According to Texas Education Code, school districts are required to report to the State Board for Educator Certification if an educator is fired for committing an unlawful act with a student or minor. Any superintendent or director who makes an official report to SBEC is immune from civil or criminal liability.

Toben says the change to remove the fear of lawsuits for those who tell the truth about former employees is overdue.

“I think in the past, there has been a fear that if they give a bad recommendation and if there have not been any criminal charges or a finding by any type of judicial body, that there is the risk that they may get sued.

“They don’t want to get sued, but they don’t want to have the problem at their school anymore, so they just don’t say anything and leave it up to the new school district to do their own investigations,” Toben says.

Robbie Edwards-Maness, Waco Independent School District human resources director, says personnel files don’t move from one school district to the next, so the district where the person is applying won’t know about any former reprimands or admonishments.

Personnel directors’ hands also are tied to a certain degree about what they can say about a former employee.

But if they really don’t believe an employee should be hired elsewhere, that message can be conveyed, Edwards-Maness says.

“You can ask, ‘Would you rehire this person?’ If the answer is no, that’s enough for me,” Edwards-Maness says. “I feel like we have safeguards in place. Are they foolproof? I don’t know that anything is foolproof.”

Texas began fingerprinting teaching certificate applicants in 2003. Senate Bill 9 tries to ensure that people hired before 2003 are fingerprinted and receive background checks. The bill also includes provisions for background checks on noncertified employees, substitute teachers and charter school employees.

The bill also created a clearinghouse, to be operated by the Texas Department of Public Safety, that will contain national criminal history information, including updates. The law requires the DPS to make the information available to school districts, the TEA and the State Board for Educator Certification.

While the new measures might make it harder for sex-offending teachers to simply move to another city or state to continue their careers, Toben says local officials need to join forces to develop a uniform protocol about how to handle these types of investigations once new allegations surface.

School officials who try to conduct their own investigation often “muddy the waters” through the use of ineffective, often harmful techniques, such as interviewing the alleged victim and alleged perpetrator together in the same room, or interviewing the child in front of his or her parents, Toben says.

If school officials, at the least, would call the Advocacy Center for Crime Victims and Children when an allegation arises, that would help, Toben says. It makes an investigation more independent, free of potential accusations that school officials favor one side over the other.

twitherspoon@wacotrib.com

757-5737