(CT)
CT Insider [Norwalk CT]
February 9, 2026
By Republican-American Editorial Board
It’s a sad and sordid reality of human nature: Some adults have the desire to prey on children, and such people are likely to enter careers or otherwise seek out situations that give them the opportunity to do so.
For reasons that are largely impossible for functional, well-adjusted people to understand, this problem has always existed. The best society can do is take steps to identify potential predators – people, for example, who’ve faced several allegations of sexual misconduct – and remove them from settings that provide easy opportunities to offend. No institution can be expected to identify predators before they strike, but once a pattern of allegations is established, it’s the responsibility of those institutions to prioritize safety over all other concerns.
Reports from Hearst Connecticut Media indicate school officials in two Connecticut recently failed to perform this fundamental duty.
Darien High School teacher Sean Arthur Boardman was “charged with risk of injury to a child last week after being accused of slipping his hand into a female student’s pants,” Hearst CT noted, citing an arrest warrant. But if basic responsibilities had been fulfilled, he probably wouldn’t have worked there to begin with.
Hired in 2022, Mr. Boardman previously worked for the public school systems in East Haddam, where police say he was “clothed, but sweating” when “he was found alone in a room with a student on the floor on a towel,” and Stratford, where police say he “was involved in several incidents that raised concerns for some students and adults,” Hearst CT reported.
But Hearst CT, citing information obtained through a Freedom of Information Act Request, reported that “neither district disclosed any information regarding allegations of improper behavior to Darien school officials on forms they are required by law to complete as part of the employment process for educators seeking jobs at other school systems.”
Sexual-misconduct accusations leveled at teachers aren’t particularly rare, nor are they new. In December, for example, a former teacher at Meriden’s Maloney High School was charged with five counts of second-degree sexual assault. The New Haven Register and WTNH News 8 noted that, in a single week in March 2016, “Six former and current teachers and a teacher’s aide from districts across the state were scheduled to appear in state court … on charges alleging they engaged in sexual misconduct with students.” The news outlets conducted a joint investigation and found that at least 58 Connecticut teachers had been charged with sex crimes between June 2005 and March 2016 – an average of more than five per year.
Nationally, despite media focus on sexual-misconduct allegations in other institutions – namely, the Catholic Church – such allegations have long been especially common in school settings.
In her bombshell 2004 report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, education researcher Charol Shakeshaft found that 9.6% of American students reported being the victim of some form of sexual abuse by a teacher, with 6.7% reporting abuse that involved physical contact. In the famous “John Jay Report,” a comprehensive investigation into abuse in the Catholic Church between 1950 and 2002, researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice found that “approximately 4% of Catholic priests and deacons in active ministry between 1950 and 2002 have been accused of the sexual abuse of a youth under the age of 18.”
The John Jay findings rightly pointed to a systemic problem in the Catholic Church – one that diminished the Church’s reputation and caused crises of faith. But while many Americans have been conditioned – in part by the facts, in part by opportunism from media figures with an axe to grind against any institution viewed as gratuitously traditional or puritanical – to view Catholic priests with suspicion, teachers have been spared such scrutiny in mainstream discourse.
There is no foolproof way to prevent abuse. Education administrators aren’t mind-readers. But when basic safeguards are ignored, it’s easy to see how the Shakeshaft report produced such startling statistics. If the allegations against him are true, Mr. Boardman is the chief villain of this story – but the administrators who failed to inform Darien schools are responsible, too.