Greenfield-Central school officials fired a middle school teacher this morning over what they characterized as an improper relationship between the teacher and a student.
Officials said Trina Moore, 40, developed an intense friendship with a seventh-grade girl and, during some weeks, spent hours per day outside school hours in the girl's company, talking to her on the phone or e-mailing with her.
Moore's attorneys said there was nothing improper about the relationship.
School officials said Moore refused to cease contacting the girl, however, even when instructed to do so by Greenfield Middle School Principal Jim Bever and despite complaints by the girl's mother.
School officials said the teacher already had been previously warned about getting too personally involved with students.
"These relationships arose out of teacher-student relationships, but evolved into intense personal relationships that exceed the bounds of a healthy teacher-student relationship," school officials wrote in a document explaining the School Board's decision to fire the teacher.
The board held a special meeting this morning to vote on terminating Moore's contract.
No one has suggested the relationship was sexual in nature, school officials said.
It seems the teacher involved is convinced she did nothing "wrong." I'm positive she did do something wrong. I saw this up close when I was the same age as the student in this story. A female friend of mine got a lot, and I mean a whole lot, or extra attention from our 7th grade teacher. It was very noticeable, and my friend was very uncomfortable about it. Hell, everyone in our circle of friends was uncomfortable about it. As in this current case there was never a suggestion of sexual abuse, but there was the expected teasing that went on among some of our classmates about how she had been chosen by the "lesbian" teacher. (Give 'em a break, they were 12 year olds.) When it was brought up in conversation, my friend would be embarrassed and really not know what to say. She realized it was an unnaturally intense relationship for a teacher to have with a young student, but she didn't know how to tell an adult to stop showering her with attention. Therein lies the "wrongness" of these types of situations. This is not the proper venue for "friendship" in any sense of the word. The distance between Teacher and Student, Adult and Child are simply too great to be bridged. This is not the meeting of equals, so there cannot be real friendship. Most people know this instinctively, but some people do not understand.
Moore's attorney said the teacher is considering a legal appeal of the board's decision.
"The relationship between this teacher and this student was undisputed as a helpful, supportive relationship," said Kevin Betz, Moore's attorney.
Phone records obtained through the school's investigation indicate that Moore spent more than 11 hours on the phone with the student on one day in June of 2006 and spent similar amounts of phone time with the girl on several other days.
Greenfield-Central Superintendent Linda Gellert said teachers must exercise sound judgment.
"There need to be well-established boundaries," Gellert said. "The expectation is that teachers will maintain a professional decorum with children. I think you have to be careful when you try to be friends with children."
It simply does not matter if the teacher is "nice" or "supportive" to the student. The fact that the teacher was warned about having too close a contact with the child and that the behavior persisted underscores the fact that this was an inherently unhealthy compulsion on the part of the teacher.
This doesn't mean we have to go completely the other direction and have every student be a stranger to every teacher, but there have to be boundaries.
Just as teachers are not employed to take their students as lovers, they are also not employed to take them as their new best friend.
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