Sex. Murder. Mystery(201)

One teacher was unsure about comparing the size of a student's hand in a math exercise discussing growth.

“I thought twice about having his hand compared to my hand,” she said. “Touch would be involved.”

And touching was wrong.

Another time a teacher was discussing how ballads were often written to bring out sad and tragic stories. Some kid thought they should write about Mary Kay Letourneau.

When another teacher discussed Nelson Mandela's incarceration as a political prisoner in South Africa, a kid shouted out an example all the students could understand.

“You mean like Ms. Letourneau?”

The teacher changed the subject.

In fact, she changed her curriculum on the spot. No more of the torn-from-the-headlines approach to current events. There was no newspaper, no magazine, that was a Letourneau-free zone.

For that very reason, some also stopped doing current events.

And there were the smarmy jokes about the “private lessons” Shorewood teachers gave their students. It got so bad that some teachers declined to be specific about the name of the school where they taught and even what district. Whenever Highline or Shorewood was mentioned at a conference it brought chuckles and the remark that they were “from the Mary Kay Letourneau District.”

Most teachers don't take up the profession because they want to get rich. They do it because they believe they can help young people grow and learn. Being associated with a breach of professional ethics occurring in their own school was humiliating.

What was a mother to do? Danelle Johnson asked that question of herself over and over. Her kids weren't eggheads, but neither were they retarded. She was convinced that with a little support from the Highline School District or even an interested teacher, her twins Molly and Drew could make it through school. For a time, she thought that Mary Letourneau's interest in Molly and the after-school projects might have been the answer. When Mary dumped Molly from the group and months later when the scandal broke, she knew what false hopes she had harbored.

After she had the twins tested and found they were academically at a third-grade level—not seventh—she played hardball with Highline.

“I went from being a neglectful, nonparenting, nonhomework-guiding mother to an overbearing, pushing bitch in about two and half minutes,” she said later.

Seventh grade at Cascade was proving iffy—though Danelle had no idea until later that one of the reasons was that her son and daughter had become so wrapped up with Mrs. Letourneau and Vili Fualaau.

According to her mother, Molly was having the most difficult time in middle school. She was a truant. She was a runaway. A former classmate from Mary Letourneau's sixth-grade class took Molly to Seattle and attempted to sell her virginity to an Asian gang—or so Molly said later. The girl couldn't stay focused on school and the administration notified her mother: She was disruptive and they didn't want her there anymore.

Danelle went to the school to straighten things out.

“I know she has problems,” she told an administrator, “but you are going to help her. She's not going to alternative school. She's not going to another school in the district. I'm driving her here every day until hell freezes over. She's going to get out of the eighth grade at Cascade.”

“You can't—” the administrator said.

Danelle cut him off with the coldest look she could make.

“Do not make me say the L word. Because I will scream 'Letourneau' until the cows come home if it's the only way that I can help my daughter.”

“We don't want that… ”

Later, when her best efforts at helping her daughter stay in school were still failing, Danelle recalled her threat.

“I don't believe that it is all Ms. Letourneau's fault,” she said. “It is unfortunate that my kids got mixed up with that group of kids because they've got a hard enough background. They didn't need this kind of drama to lead them up the wrong way.”

She saw the school as somewhat culpable. Why hadn't someone from Shorewood stepped in to stop the teacher when this were clearly amiss?

“If those kids were really down there until ten o'clock at night, if she was in that school so late—until ten—who in the hell is running the place?”





Chapter 61

MARY KAY CALLED Michelle from jail to tell her some extraordinary and welcome news. She was not alone in the effort to remain true with her love for Vili Fualaau. A man from England named Tony Hollick, characterized by Mary Kay as a man of “unquestionable brilliance,” offered to lead the charge from the tyranny of her “oppression-based” treatment to a blissful life with her fourteen-year-old lover. Tony Hollick had read about Mary Kay's case on the Internet and contacted her at the end of the summer of 1997.