[Ksyrup]

Ex-teacher gets year in jail for relationship with pupil
Saturday, July 30, 2005

By EMAN VAROQUA
STAFF WRITER



A 28-year-old former math teacher at a Passaic middle school was sentenced to one year in jail for having an intimate relationship with a teenage student.

Maria C. Saco of Passaic pleaded guilty to endangering the welfare of a child and was sentenced Thursday to the Passaic County Jail.

Saco was teaching remedial math during summer school in 2003 to seventh- and eighth-graders when she met the boy, then 14. The boy went on to high school, but Saco's attorney, Joseph Afflitto Sr., said the boy contacted her through e-mail. The two started a relationship that fall. Saco had even given the boy a key to her apartment.

She resigned from her full-time position at Lincoln Middle School shortly after she was arrested in October.

Superior Court Judge Marilyn C. Clark in Paterson said in court that she felt jail was appropriate instead of probation.

In 2002, a Bergen County judge elicited criticism when he sentenced a Clifton teacher who had sex with a 13-year-old student to probation instead of jail. Judge Bruce A. Gaeta had suggested the affair may have been a way for the boy to "satisfy his sexual needs." That decision was overturned, and the teacher, Pamela Diehl-Moore of Lyndhurst, was sentenced to three years in prison. It was later revealed that Gaeta was not handed all the files of the psychological analysis of the student.

Saco's sentencing sparked a discussion during the sentencing about female sex offenders compared with male offenders.

Reached Friday, Joseph Del Russo, Passaic County chief assistant prosecutor, said, "What she did was no less exploitive, no less a form of betrayal, and no less traumatic for the 14-year-old male."

Del Russo said that what is often the case is that male offenders commit these acts to satisfy sexual desires, whereas females do so to satisfy emotional needs.

Afflitto said in Saco's case, the boy had pursued his teacher, and had made other advances to two other teachers. One teacher, Afflitto said, rejected him outright, and the other reported his e-mail to school security.

Saco "unfortunately made the bad judgment of responding," he said. "The young man in the end is still underage. But he wasn't somebody victimized or pressured. He was soliciting her. It wasn't your typical situation where the teacher is abusing their position."

Saco had just broken off a volatile relationship and was dealing with severe self-esteem issues, Del Russo said. And that was why she was vulnerable to this situation, Afflitto said.

Such was the case with Lisa Bell, the Paterson Catholic Regional High School teacher who pleaded guilty in 2003 to child cruelty for a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old male student. Bell, 34, of Wood-Ridge, was found "emotionally and socially awkward and immature" by a state psychological evaluation.

"It doesn't make it right," Del Russo said. "But we study these cases to learn from them."

Clark also barred Saco from serving in any public capacity in the future. Saco will have to register as a sex offender and be subject to community supervision for life.