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The mother of a Colorado teen who was allegedly seduced by her teacher says woke school policies allowed school officials to ignore red flags and helped a teacher to groom her vulnerable daughter for years.
Investigations by cops and the school allege Leann Kearney, 37, engaged in a systematic campaign to alienate the girl from her parents — and used school administrators to help.
The principal and others at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, were all too happy for Kearney have control of the girl under the guise of helping her “navigate her sexuality,” the mother alleges.
“This was years of grooming. Then she took her,” the mom said. “She took my kid.”
As to why officials kept the girl’s parents in the dark about the situation: the state’s policies meant to protect transgender students drove a rift between parents of all kinds of kids and educators, said Lindsay Datko of advocacy JeffCo Kids First.
“Transgender equal opportunity policy — before we fought two years to change it — said to leave parents out of the transition process if students said that’s what they wanted,” Datko explained. “It instilled a culture of secrecy.”
On Feb. 14, the principal apologized to families and staff after public records revealed how now-disgraced social studies teacher Kearney duped officials into helping her prey on an underage student.
“This horrible situation will haunt me for the rest of my life. I am deeply sorry for the pain this family has experienced,” principal Scott Christy said in a letter.
The school has since updated its policies on child safety and staff will receive additional training on how to prevent a similar situation from happening again, the letter said.
The apology came nearly a year after the ex-teacher allegedly ran off to Oregon with her student the moment the girl turned 18 — with no criminal charges even though state officials found she had groomed the teen for years.
“She was 15 when she was in Kearney’s class,” the girl’s mother — who asked that neither she nor her daughter be named — told The Post.
Since the teen entered Kearney’s class as a sophomore in 2018, the two exchanged 24,000 text messages, spent dozens of hours on the phone, met in secret, and — according to a note written by the teen — even kissed while the girl was underage, according to investigations by the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office and school district that were viewed by The Post.
Kearney got the girl a job at her Planet Fitness gym and let her use her pickup truck. At one point Kearney’s girlfriend dumped her, and she told investigators Kearney’s relationship with her young student was a point of contention, according to the investigative documents.
The mother claims Kearney pushed her daughter to submit a fraudulent application for federal “homeless youth” status, which would allow her to move out of the house — and away from the watchful eye of her parents
Kearney began asking colleagues about that application process when her alleged future lover was only 15 years old, records show.
Kearney and her victim recruited her guidance counselor, the principal, and another teacher for help, telling them the teen was in a dangerous, abusive home and didn’t feel safe staying with her parents. But the staff never contacted her parents themselves and never checked her story out — not even with her younger brother, who went to the same school and had the same guidance counselor.
Reached for comment, the school referred The Post to its open letter apologizing about the case. He said he notified school authorities, and that Kearney was on military deployment at the time and never returned to the school.
When the counselor forwarded her application paperwork to a district official, she specifically asked them not to contact the girl’s parents, internal emails revealed.
But even though the girl’s mom didn’t know about her homelessness claim, she had gotten wise to her “special” relationship with Kearney. She messaged the teacher asking her not to contact her daughter again, yet Kearney never responded and kept texting and calling the girl, who was then 17.Finally, the mom brought the matter before principal Christy. The mom said Christy dismissed the red flags, claiming that Kearney simply took a special interest in “helping kids navigate their sexuality.”
In the Feb. 14 letter, Christy admitted that “proper procedures were not followed” for the girl’s homeless youth application, but he said he didn’t brush off her mom’s concerns and alerted the district’s Title IX coordinator — though an investigation revealed that the district’s legal team was not notified. He also said Kearney would have been fired had she not resigned first.The state did eventually strip Kearney of her teaching license last December because of “evidence…that ‘grooming’ occurred.’”But by then Kearney had already run off to Oregon with the girl, who is now an adult but still half Keaney’s age.
“What the lead [sheriff’s] investigator told me is it’s going to be like that until she realizes she is in an abusive situation,” the mom said.
She added: “This was deliberate, calculated and a conspiracy.”
Multiple attempts to reach Kearney were unsuccessful.
