No Jail for WV Teacher in Sex Case

(Kingwood, West Virginia) In June 2006, a former West Preston Middle School physical education teacher, Lana Jo Rinehart, was charged with sexually assaulting a 13-year-old male student in September 2005. Rinehart resigned her teaching position in November 2005.

In the latest development in the Rinehart case, she gets a hand slap.

Twenty-eight-year-old Lana Jo Rinehart of Terra Alta has agreed to a deal in which she'll serve two years' supervised probation and surrender her teaching license.

Preston County Prosecuting Attorney Melvin C. Snyder III said Monday that the deal, known as a pretrial diversion, was done at the request of the victim and the boy's mother.

Rinehart was charged in 2006 with third-degree sexual assault and sexual abuse by a custodian.

Therefore, with glacial efficiency, the court remembered to do something about the Rinehart case, taking a mere 18 months to decide it would do nothing.

Notably, a West Virginia media source, theintelligencer.net, has weighed in on the case.

While we can understand the desire of the victim and his family to put the unpleasantness behind them without going through a trial, we fear, quite frankly, that Rinehart is being allowed to walk away without sufficiently severe punishment.

She abused the teacher-student relationship, after all, harming a child she was supposed to be helping.

The message West Virginians ought to be sending in such situations is that behavior like Rinehart's will not be tolerated -- and will be punished severely. We don't think that message is being sent in Preston County.

Should a similar situation occur in our area, we urge prosecutors, judges -- and victims and their families -- to consider that severe punishment of criminals is intended, in part, to deter others from such behavior.

Ditto. And let's not forget, Rinehart was in her mid-twenties, the boy was 13. It seems more than a simple lapse in judgment.

Tip: Don Morgenstern