Teacher Pleads Guilty After Having Baby With Student She Adopted

A former teacher in Ohio pleaded guilty to charges stemming from a three-year relationship she had with her student-turned-adopted son that resulted in a child.

On Friday, March 23, Laura Lynn Cross, 37, of Tallmadge, Ohio, pleaded guilty to three counts of sexual battery, third-degree felonies, in connection to a three-year relationship she had with one of her teenage students, the Akron Beacon Journal reports.

According to prosecutors, Cross and the teenager became sexually involved in 2014, while he was a freshman at Buchtel High School, where she taught English.

Their relationship reportedly became more complicated in 2015 when Cross resigned from her teaching position. According to News 5 Cleveland, Cross convinced the teen’s mother to allow the teen to move in with her in her Tallmadge home through a court approved “partial parental custody” arrangement. Cross reportedly told the boy’s mother that she would continue to “mentor” him.

In June 2015, the teen’s mother filed a complaint with Akron police and contacted Summit County prosecutors and police in Tallmadge, where her son was living with Cross. Charges were not filed until police learned that Cross had given birth to the teen’s child in December 2015. The baby had been kept a secret until someone called the teenager’s father.

Cross was arrested in August 2017 on sexual battery charges after authorities obtained a recording of the teen confessing to his father.

“First of all, she’s a schoolteacher. To get aroused by a child, basically you have to be a sick individual,” the teen’s father said, adding that “it was a straight failure from the system. From the school and definitely from the police.”

The teen’s father had reportedly raised concerns to both a Buchtel High School official and Tallmadge Police as early as 2012 when his son was a freshman, but no charges were filed.

Cross is currently being held in the Summit County Jail under $100,000 bond. She is set to be sentenced May 24.