Public schools have a grooming problem, and I’m not just talking about the obvious.

There is lots of attention paid to the obvious problem of teachers indoctrinating kids into the LGBTQIA+ cult, but that is simply a part of a much larger problem the public schools have with pedophiles and ephebophiles infiltrating the school system.

I first learned about this problem when I was digging into the Catholic Church scandals with pedophile priests. As a practicing Catholic I was bothered by by the phenomenon itself, and by the fact that all the attention was focused on the Church’s problems rather than the ubiquity of child grooming in other churches and especially in the public schools.

Pedophilia is unacceptable wherever it rears its ugly head, but attention to it has depended upon whether the pedophiles practice their evil deeds in respected or reviled institutions. And the public schools have traditionally been respected institutions (as Churches were once upon a time), so the problem gets swept under the rug.

Well, the Chicago Public Schools have gotten a wake-up call via an inspector general report. More than a slap in the face, it should be a gut punch to the schools and the parents whose children are at risk.

Hundreds of Chicago Public Schools teachers sexually groomed, assaulted and raped CPS students last school year.

That’s according to the report released this week by the CPS Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which said it received more than 600 “adult on student” misconduct allegations for the 2021-22 school year, substantiating more than half of them and initiating criminal charges in 16 cases.

They include a CPS teacher who “groomed and sexually assaulted” a 17- year-old student on three occasions. The student “said that she began to think of him as her friend and therapist” and that he “touched and groped the student while hugging her, touching her thighs and buttocks under the pretext of removing lint from her clothing.”

“I like the way you look in your jeans,” the student recounted the teacher as saying.

Allegations against the teacher were “in part corroborated by text messages on the CPS- sanctioned Remind app, Snapchat records, and a student witness who overheard a conversation between the teacher and student” as well as the teacher’s own statements.

The teacher, who is currently fighting termination with the Illinois State Board of Education, was charged with multiple counts of sexual assault but acquitted by a Cook County jury in November.

To give you an idea of the scope of the problem, the allegations of abuse numbered more than 600 in a single year in a single school district. The Catholic sexual abuse scandals for the entire United States over 52 years included 11,000 allegations. That would mean that in the same time period the CPS would see 2 1/2 times as many incidents of abuse as the Catholic Church in the entire US.

Obviously we can’t assume a constant rate of abuse in either institution, so the comparison is simply for scale. We have no reliable statistics covering the entirety of the country, but the scale of the problem obviously dwarfs that in other walks of life.

Yet every year public school teachers are encouraged to get more and more intimate with students, to the point of encouraging students and teachers to share secret discussions about sexuality and to keep secrets from parents.

This is both wrong and dangerous, and this inspector general report makes glaringly obvious why that is so. Already we are putting adults and children into close daily contact, and the more intimate we make these relationships the more potentially dangerous they can be. I went to school in the 1970s and knew of multiple cases of sexual relationships between students and teachers at a time when they were substantially more taboo than today.

Nobody would have encouraged students and teachers keeping secrets from parents at the time; today, it is school policy. How can this not be inherently dangerous?

You now find teachers routinely claiming to love students more than their parents do, and school policies are based upon the idea that student relationships with teachers should be especially intimate with regard to sexual matters. Teachers discuss sexual practices, demonstrate the use of sex toys, and share books that are sexual manuals with students. With the encouragement of school administrations and school boards.

Sexual contact between some students and teachers in such environments is inevitable. This is the definition of grooming.

The OIG found that a CPS Junior ROTC staff member had sex with a female CPS high school student “over the course of a year when she was 16 to 17 years old,” providing her with alcohol and asking her to buy marijuana for him from her fellow students.

An investigation revealed “hundreds of text messages and calls” between the CPS staff member and and student, including “overtly sexual” ones.

“I’m ready to f*** right now … I’m not gonna be gentle either,” the staff member texted the high school student.

He later “threatened to kill the student and her family” if they disclosed the relationship to investigators.

Other sex incidents include:

— An employee of a CPS vendor “asked a fourth-grade student why her lips were chapped, and then stated that the student’s lips were chapped because she was ‘sucking dick.’

— CPS high school gym teacher who repeatedly exposed himself to one sophomore girl and connected with another 15 year old student on social media and “sent her photos and videos of himself masturbating and engaged in other sexual acts.”

—A CPS substitute teacher who “asked a student to recruit another student for a ‘threesome,” told another student he loved her, repeatedly attempted to kiss a student and asked her “to make out with him,” commented on a student’s “hickey” and described himself to students as “well hung.”

—A CPS elementary teacher who “sexually touched” a CPS student repeatedly over several years, when he was 11 to 14 years old. He also “purchased food and gifts for the student and members of his family,” and “spent the night in the student’s bedroom, having sex with the student.”

–A CPS charter school administrator who “took a high school junior to a Broadway musical in downtown Chicago.” During the performance, the administrator allegedly “touched the student’s leg with his own” and then, while driving the student home “slid his hand down inside of the front of the student’s pants and touched his genitals.”

The administrator later took the student on trips to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, London, Ibiza and the Bahamas.

–An employee of a CPS vendor asked a 19 year-old female student to dinner,  sent her a nude photo of himself and asked if he could join her while she was babysitting.

–A CPS high school teacher exchanged “approximately 4,000 (text) messages” with a female student over two years, including “400 on one day.” In them, the teacher told the student he was “bisexual” and “that he was in an open marriage and was attracted to other people.”

The same teacher asked another student “to show him her underwear” and, while they were talking in his office, “asked if she wanted to take her clothes off.”

–An employee of a CPS vendor “called a fourth-grade female student ‘sexy’ and made other prohibited comments to her about her physical appearance.”

In a presentation to the CPS Board of Education in August, the CPS OIG reported that between July 1, 2021 and June 30, 2022, it opened investigations into 81 sexual touching cases, 35 cases of grooming, 33 cases of sexual abuse, 26 cases of sexual acts, 25 cases of in-person sexual comments, 14 sexual electronic communications, eight cases of “outcry about past (sexual) conduct and 243 cases it deemed “concerning: other.”

“Concerning: other” cases “may involve leering, ‘creepy’ behavior or other potentially concerning behavior.

Remember: this is all in one year in one school district.

We need to get sex out of schools; that won’t prevent abuses, but it will certainly reduce their incidence and stop encouraging their proliferation.