[American Thinker] On April 15, Jackson County, Missouri, prosecutors charged James R. Green Jr., 52, with six counts of second-degree statutory sodomy. Green was a teacher and coach at a middle school in the suburban North Kansas City School District. Green’s victim was a sixteen-year-old boy. It appears likely that Green was abusing other boys over a period of at least twelve years in at least two different school districts, and Green’s crime is not the half of it.I learned about this crime for one reason. In January, I became editor of a new, nonprofit, online publication -- Sentinelksmo.org -- designed to counter the disinformation spread by the overwhelmingly liberal media in Missouri and Kansas. Over the years, people have approached me with stories about regional abuses, and I had an easier time placing those stories nationally than locally. In these two deeply red states, there was no media outlet of consequence halfway friendly to conservative causes. Now there is, the Sentinel.
Our partner in this project, the Kansas Policy Institute, hoped to correct the relentlessly dishonest reporting on Kansas taxes and state spending in general and the Sam Brownback administration in particular. As a resident of Missouri, I wanted to cover both states on a wide range of issues, including sex, crime, and education. To do this I had to track the local media and, in doing so, I hit the trifecta when I stumbled upon the article about Green. The story was covered by the local media, but barely.
Without digging too hard, I discovered that Green was the sixth employee, all male, busted on sex charges with underage students in the last thirteen months in this one suburban school district. At least five of those employees were arrested. The reporting on the sixth was too sketchy to determine. Four of the interactions were heterosexual, two homosexual.
In the same week Green was arrested, a campus supervisor at a high school in the North Kansas City District was charged with sending messages of a sexual nature to two female students, one fourteen and one fifteen. His was one of three cases at that same suburban school. In January 2017, the principal was arrested for having sex with students twenty years prior, and in August 2016 the band director was dismissed for sending sexual texts to students.
In November 2016, a teacher pleaded guilty to second-degree statutory sodomy with a female middle school student and was sentenced in December to seven years in prison. And in March 2016, a high school gym teacher was charged with sending pornography and sexting messages to two teenage students.