The 17-year-old was suiting up for track practice in February 2018 when his gym teacher at Canton McKinley High School reached out to him on Snapchat.
The 17-year-old was suiting up for track practice in February 2018 when his gym teacher at Canton McKinley High School reached out to him on Snapchat.
Tiffany Eichler asked the boy to come to her nearby office.
When he got there, Eichler locked the door, flipped off the lights and began pulling down his pants, the boy later told police.
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Eichler also had sex with two other teenage boys during the winter months of 2018 before she got caught.
She is one of at least five female teachers, counselors or school administrators in Greater Akron schools — city, suburban and rural — to face charges of having sex or sexual contact with students during the past two years.
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Some have downplayed or even laughed off the seriousness of female educators having sex with teenage students, playing into the trope of hormone-driven boys lusting after the women at the front of the class.
But many prosecutors and people who work with the abused say female teachers having sex with male students are doing just as much harm as their male counterparts who prey on girls.
Nationwide, about 10 percent of all students experience sexual misconduct by a school employee sometime between kindergarten and the time they graduate from high school, according to a 2017 study funded by the U.S. Justice Department.
Male abusers outnumber female, the study said. But the number of reports of female educators charged with sex abuse of students is rising — not necessarily because there are more women abusing children, but because they’re getting caught, some experts say.
In Stark County, Eichler pleaded guilty last year to three felony counts of sexual battery.
Prosecutors asked a judge to sentence her to four years in prison, but the judge thought Eichler — who surrendered her teaching license and will forever have to register with authorities as a sex offender — had largely suffered enough.
He sentenced her to 30 days in jail and another 30 days in what Stark County calls “half-jail,” a sort of day detention room for adults.
