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Former teacher gets jail, probation for sex with student
YOUNGSTOWN
A 31-year-old former Warren G. Harding High School remedial-reading teacher was sentenced to three years’ probation, beginning with six months in Mahoning County jail, for engaging in a sex act with an 18-year-old male student.
Amanda Basile of Austintown drew the sentence Wednesday from Judge Lou A. D’Apolito of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court.
Basile pleaded guilty last month to a single fourth-degree felony count of gross sexual imposition, which was reduced in the plea agreement from sexual battery, a third-degree felony.
Basile resigned her teaching job in April and voluntarily surrendered her teaching license after she admitted to a Warren police detective she had engaged in a sex act March 14 with the student outside of the regular school day.
Warren police referred the matter to Austintown police because the act occurred in that township.
Basile was charged under a state law that makes it a crime for a teacher, coach or administrator to engage in sexual activity with a student attending the school where he or she works.
Basile was hired July 12, 2012, and began teaching that August, according to school district files.
In her plea agreement, Basile said she agreed “that some form and period of incarceration will be imposed” and that she will have to register as a sex offender annually for 15 years.
Basile was “in a position of authority to these kids, and she abused that,” said Jennifer McLaughlin, an assistant county prosecutor.
McLaughlin conceded the sex act was consensual.
She asked the judge, however, to impose “an appropriate term of incarceration” to deter other teachers and coaches “who need to hear this message that this is not something that is acceptable” or tolerable.
Citing Basile’s lack of any prior criminal record, her lawyer, Sam Amendolara, called for a jail term of no more than 10 days.
Basile apologized for her crime. “I failed morally. I let the stresses of my life overwhelm me” while going through a divorce, she said.
Judge D’Apolito said her life’s stresses “are an explanation of what happened, not an excuse.”