A Chicago-area teacher has been accused of having sex with a 16-year-old student.

Ashley Blumenshine, 27, a physical education teacher at Plainfield North High School in Illinois, was discovered on Jan. 5th  in a car with a 16-year-old male student in the parking lot of a Kohls store.  Police noticed two suspicious cars sitting at the far end of the parking lot behind the store, and upon pulling up they discovered one car was empty while the other had two occupants; Ms. Blumenshine was in the driver’s seat of the second car while the unidentified student was in the back seat.  Upon questioning, both admitted to having engaged in sexual intercourse before the arrival of the police.  Blumenshine was arrested on a charge of criminal sexual abuse, and released the following day on $75,000 bond with an order to have no unsupervised contact with anyone under the age of 18.

Since the time of the incident, Ms. Blumenshine has tendered her resignation to the 202 consolidated school district, which they have accepted, and the school where she has taught since 2006 is also moving to have her teaching certificate revoked.

On Jan. 26th she appeared in court to enter her plea of not guilty to the charge of aggravated criminal sexual abuse.  She will have a pretrial hearing on March 2nd.

Sadly, we’re sure this will be the first of many teacher sex scandals this year.  I’ve tried to cut back some on how many of these I write up just because they’re so depressing when you really think about it.  I looked it up, and my 2010 teacher sex scandals had only 11 posts as opposed to the 2009 teacher sex scandals having 24. This isn’t to say there were less incidents, I simply tried to pay less attention to them.

Here’s hoping 2011 will have fewer of these stories to come across my news feeds, but I somehow doubt that will happen.