2006-09-15  Little's changed since child molester Noyes taught

"These guys were gods. They were good-looking, all of them. They were so powerful."

That's the most telling quote in all the coverage of the sex-scandal involving the Quest program at Prince of Wales school.

What student hasn't had a crush on a teacher? It's what makes being a kid -- especially a hormone-raging teen -- so dangerous.

It's what makes being a teacher dangerous.

That power relationship of teacher over student, of adult over child demands strict standards of conduct. It's why sexual offence laws differentiate between children and adults, with a separate offence for sexual exploitation and stiffer penalties for pedophiles.

It's also why policing those offences is so difficult. Even years later, some victims are more embarrassed by their own bad judgment than that of the teacher. Some remain in the thrall of that person or that moment.

Rumours swirled around the Quest program and the teachers almost from the moment the program began in 1972 and long after it was cancelled in 1987.

Yet nobody at the Vancouver school board seems to have done anything about that or about the rumours even though there is a legal duty to report suspicions of child abuse.

Last week, there was confusion about when the board was notified that police were investigating Quest's former head teacher Tom Ellison, who quit teaching soon after the program was cancelled. He was charged in 2004 with six counts of gross indecency and two counts of indecent assault between 1972 and 1982 and goes to trial in October.

But two other Quest teachers continued in the classroom for more than 20 years after Quest shut down. Stan Callegari worked in Vancouver schools until he was fired in 2005. Dean Hull was fired by the Surrey board in 2004. The B.C. College of Teachers is investigating them for their conduct in the Quest program.

The college was set up in 1986 in partial response to notorious child molester Robert Noyes having been able to move from school to school throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Noyes was arrested in 1985 and charged with more than 30 sexual assaults on children aged six to 15. But there had never been bad reports on his file.

Former Coquitlam trustee Alan Birchard admitted last year that rather than firing Noyes in 1979, the board allowed him to resign after he was found in a sleeping bag with a student during an out-of-town school trip.

"Everyone was anxious to avoid the publicity of having had a pedophile teacher employed by the school district," Birchard wrote in a letter to then-education minister Tom Christiansen, adding that the superintendent promised trustees that he would warn his colleagues about Noyes.

Birchard wrote the minister after it was reported that Abbotsford substitute teacher Serg Glen Lebedoff continued teaching for years despite a history of sexual misconduct -- including sex with an underage girl.

The Abbotsford board never reported its disciplinary actions to the college.

Had nothing changed, Birchard asked. His question remains pertinent.

VSB chairman Ken Denike said this week that its processes for investigating, disciplining and informing both the trustees and the college are "a dog's breakfast."

And what about Surrey? Set aside what it knew when about Hull.

In 2004, former superintendent Fred Renihan not only neglected to inform the board that Shawn Seong Su Yu had been charged with sexual interference involving a 14-year-old student, he transferred Yu to another school and let him teach another 19 months. It was only after Yu's court date was set that Yu was taken out of the classroom.

There are two glaring problems.

One is that the courts don't seem to take protection of children as seriously as the college of teachers does. Two recent B.C. Court of Appeal rulings overturned the cancellation of Patrice Ellen Mitchell's and David Michael Young's teaching certificates. Mitchell had a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old boy, Young had one with a 16-year-old girl.

The court reduced Mitchell's punishment to a retroactive two-year suspension and Young's to a retroactive one-year suspension. (Young, now 35, is currently being investigated by the college for having an inappropriate relationship with a 16-year-old student in Williams Lake.)

The court decisions have had a chilling effect, leaving college registrar Marie Kerchum to wonder whether its disciplinary actions are too harsh.

The other problem is that the B.C. government has never given the college the powers and resources it needs.

It currently has a backlog of 100 cases and only two investigators. There is still no employment registry. Tougher rules about when school districts must report teacher discipline haven't materialized, nor have the fines for failure to do so. And the college still isn't required to report not only which teachers have been disciplined but where the misconduct occurred.

All these years later, the "gods" still have too much power and there's still too little accountability.