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Glendale Adventist Academy Teacher Convicted of Sexual Misconduct with a Student
Submitted: Mar 4, 2013
By AT News Team
The Los Angeles Times reported on Friday (March 1) that a former contract music instructor at the Adventist secondary school in Glendale, California, was sentenced to five years probation after pleading no contest to a charge of lewd acts with a minor. Valerie J. Gonzales is age 29 and the married mother of a child. The newspaper quoted her personal website on which she described herself as “a classically-trained singer, pianist and conductor” fluent in several languages.
Gonzales’ role at the school was to teach private singing lessons. She admitted to police that she became sexually involved with a male secondary student at the school from June into the fall of 2012. The parents of the student reported the situation and Gonzales was arrested October 2. Her sentencing also requires that she spend a year in counseling and register as a sex offender for the rest of her life.
Gonzales has performed with the Petite Opera in Glendale and at the famed Hollywood Bowl. She is evidently a person of faith; the newspaper reported that she sent a Twitter message last week, “Thank You, Lord for sustaining me through the whole process.”
Glendale Adventist Academy has 611 students enrolled in Kindergarten through Grade 12 and a total of 37 faculty members. Glendale is a suburb of Los Angeles where a hospital affiliated with the Adventist Church is located, as well as the office of the Southern California Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. There are seven Adventist churches in the community with a total of nearly 2,800 members.
“Unfortunately, this happens often enough now that many times it is not reported in the news media,” a family counselor told Adventist Today. “Adventist schools and congregations are not immune from the mental health problems that contribute to the sad outcomes. It is very likely just as common among the most conservative circles, such as various independent ministries.”
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Fear and guilt; something inculcated into generations of people. Inexcusable, especially by ones who target others for their own selfish little gain-and certainly not limited by any means to criminals or pedophiles. Many do so innocuously enough, even believing the result justifies the means. I am sorry for what was done to your son, Vernon. It is reprehensible. It also happens to highlight the need for us to permit and encourage our children to speak the deepest things they sense (your son undoubtedly knew what the teacher did was wrong, both during the crime and after the fact, evinced by his inability to tell you decades after. He apparently internalised the shame, as if he himself were somehow guilty).
Note that God answers the shame problem first, immediately in the shadow of the apple tree. My question; why do we who purport to be the remnant God's church still use shame and guilt? Doing so just deepens the fig leaves, and so we polish our apples for a lifetime afterward, with a deeply internalised self-condemnation that is reflected outward.
What sort of internal personal reality would our children have-and would our churches own inner environment be more healthy-if we left that shame/guilt mechanism where God dealt with it? It might be expedient to use it, but it surely causes a lifetime of secrets and shame in thousands of victims.
The deeper point, Vernon, might be viewed that a fundamental flaw in even (especially?)our faith community is that we often, and unwittingly, innocuously even, raise children that are already primed to this mechanism. It might actually be almost hardwired nature in us...it was present in the garden. It certainly can also be reinforced. How do we raise children who can say no-and report these things without need of hiding-, and thereby encourage a safer community within our faith -and the larger world?
"Who told you to be ashamed...?"
These were the first explicit recorded words of God to man in the book of beginnings.
A California Christian college has been accused of firing a female teacher for having premarital sex, and then offering her job to her fiance. Teacher Teri James, 29, admits she pledged not to engage in "immoral behavior," but says in a lawsuit it was "humiliating" for the college to fire her when pregnant, and to offer her job to her fiance, who had impregnated her.
The old sexual double standard is still practiced by Christians.
We as parents should never dismiss such statements from our child. The same can be said for bullying.
Parents must recognize signs that for some reason, the child does not like a person, or does not wish to go to school when they are small and most eager to attend.
My son in kindergarten, began to "delay" the short block walk to school with the excuse, "the crossing guard had gone," or similar complaints. Eventually, he absolutely refused to go and the principal called and warned me he would become a later truant.
I respected him without understanding the reason. Later, in first grade he absolutely loved schools.
Only when he was much older, did he say that while resting, he whispered to the girl next on her mat, and the teacher yanked him up by the ear, "it hurt me," and that was the reason.