Fifth Grade Teacher in Louisiana’s Cajun Country Hit with More than Two Dozen Sex Charges Involving Students

A former fifth grade teacher in the heart of Louisiana’s Cajun country is facing a stunning 25 charges — including rape — related to sexual abuse of two of her minor students.

The St. Martin Parish Office 15 miles south of Lafayette has charged Maris Noel, 31, with the multiple counts following an investigation that began in January when a complaint surfaced of an alleged inappropriate relationship with a former student.

The charges include ten counts of indecent behavior with juveniles, two counts related to child sexual abuse material, one count of unlawful communications, three counts of computer-aided solicitation of a minor, and one count of rape of a student.

At the time of the alleged offenses, Noel was a teacher at Teche Elementary School — a school where French is spoken and studied as a second language.

St. Martin’s Parish, a term similar to a “county” in other parts of the U.S., is in the “heart of Arcadia,” also commonly known as “Cajun country.”

The Cajun culture places a strong emphasis on a devout Roman Catholic lifestyle, festive community gatherings, and folk traditions that go back to the British deporting French settlers from Nova Scotia to parts of Louisiana in the 1700s.

Teche Elementary is located in Cecilia, a town of hardly 1,800 and has been described as one of the “last strongholds” of the Cajun French language where it is spoken in daily communication, including by children.

The elementary school serves grades three through five and is certified as a “French immersion” school where students receive a bilingual curriculum.

As Breitbart News exclusively has reported, educator sexual misconduct in the past two decades has become “rampant” in the U.S., occurring in school districts large and small and ranging from small public schools to elite academies in large cities.

Leading researchers cite a culture of permissiveness, reluctance to report fellow teachers, and often secret student-teacher contact through the internet as among the contributing factors to teacher sexual abuse of students.

One researcher called the problem “100 times worse” than the highly publicized sex scandal that hit the Catholic church in past decades.

The St. Martin’s sheriff’s office has not released the ages of Noel’s alleged victims, although typical fifth graders are 10 or 11 years old.

Noel was booked into the St. Martin’s Parish Correctional Center where she remains on a $750,000 bond.

Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets , which documents one of the worst cases of child sex abuse in U.S. history, and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.