A lull in the weekly parade of teachers across the U.S. being busted for sexual relationships with their students ended this week with a Minnesota teacher being hit with a jail sentence for meetups with a student and another educator in Kentucky banned from ever teaching again after pleading guilty to sexting with a pupil.
Such stories had been seemingly absent from the news cycle after the Department of Education (ED) announced a Trump administration crackdown September on school districts that enable “educator sexual misconduct,” including by transferring guilty teachers or recommending them to other school districts for jobs, as Breitbart News reported exclusively in early September.
But school sexual offenders are making the national news cycle again in what researchers call a “rampant” problem in schools across the U.S.
The Minnesota case involves Tartan High School special education teacher Ann Margaret Bacon, 27, based on police records showings she was meeting a boy for sex in a hotel just outside St. Paul.
The boy later told investigators that he and his teacher had been dating exclusively, and that he’d also stayed over at her apartment, according to local news outlet reports picked up by national outlets.
The boy was 18 years old but one of her students at the time, which she initially denied but later confessed when confronted with police evidence.
She was sentenced this week to jail and probation for “criminal sexual conduct involving a prohibited occupational relationship” after pleading guilty as part of a deal in September.
Bacon, who was hired in August 2022, resigned from her job in February 2024 on the same day she was interviewed by police, according to the Pioneer Press.
The Kentucky case, meanwhile, also involved a teacher making a plea deal to avoid trial.
Prosecutors charged former Henderson County High School teacher Rachel Clement, 29, with sending sexually explicit text messages to a student, the case developing from an investigation launched in May, according to the Hendersonian in a story also picked up by tabloids.
A Henderson Circuit Judge accepted Clement’s guilty pleas to two counts of first-degree sexual abuse with a position of authority or special trust and one count of tampering with physical evidence, the local news outlet reported Monday.
“As part of the plea agreement, Clement will never be allowed to teach within the U.S. again and must register as a sex offender on the national sex registry for life,” the New York Post reported.
Other no contact orders were part of the deal as well, including banning her from contact with the victim or his family and from the school district, according to 14 News.
Clement was slated to go to trial on Friday. The deal was made after prosecutors, Henderson police detectives, and school representatives met with the victim and his family, all of whom agreed with the plea deal.
Clement faces potentially three years on the abuse accounts and five years for evidence tampering when she is scheduled to be sentenced in January.
Such cases are part of what researchers and education officials have called an “epidemic” of teacher sexual misconduct in the past two decades, as Breitbart News reported in March in an exclusive investigation.
Cases have been surfacing in 2026 on a weekly basis in national news outlet from districts large and small, urban and rural, and public and private.
Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon, in announcing the crackdown in early September, cited a 2004 study that revealed nearly one and ten students will be subjected to sexual misconduct by the time they graduate from high school.
That study was done by university researcher Charol Shakeshaft, who has been studying the problem for several decades, and authored Organizational Betrayal about inadequate measures by school districts to address the problem.
Shakeshaft and contemporary John Jay College researcher Elizabeth L. Jeglic told Breitbart the abuse they called “rampant” has flourished for several reasons. Among these were school districts creating a “culture of permissiveness” by failing to report cases and the increased ability of predatory teachers to secretly communicate and groom their victims through texting and social media sites.
McMahon’s initiative, which includes investigations of some 20 school districts, with California and Los Angeles particularly in the crosshairs, is focused on failure to discipline teachers and a practice known as “passing the trash.”
That is the act of concealing sexual offenses and assigning a teacher to another school or recommending him or her as a good hire to another district.
While criminal law enforcement is largely the responsibility of local police and prosecutors with such cases, the federal government has the legal authority to cut off federal funds to districts enabling the abuse.
Shakeshaft bemoaned the lack of concern and action in National Review as far back as 2006 and predicted the explosion of cases, saying: “Think the Catholic Church has a problem? The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”
She also pointed out to Breitbart that recent coverage most often features nearly “pornographic” or salacious tabloid stories of female teachers having sex with young teen boys, when, in fact, research data shows male teachers account for the lion’s share of misconduct.
Breitbart 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.
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