By MARTHA RAFFAELE
(AP)
The picture of the smiling teacher and grade-school student is framed by the words, "Friends Forever."
It seems innocent enough _ an educator's token of appreciation for a prized former third-grade pupil who looked up to him as a "big brother."
But Troy Mansfield had no intention of just being Heather Kline's friend.
After spending years earning her trust, Mansfield became her molester when she reached seventh grade and he transferred to the same school.
An offer to tutor her in math after school was Mansfield's cover for a series of furtive encounters at his home that also spawned sexually charged e-mails and instant messages between them during the 2001-02 school year.
He was 31; she was 12.
He took pains to throw her increasingly suspicious mother off the trail.
State police eventually caught up with Mansfield and arrested him in August 2002. During his trial in 2004, he fainted after the girl read one of the e-mails in court and he chose to plead guilty the next day instead of letting a jury decide the case.
Now 37, Mansfield is serving nine years and nine months to 31 years in state prison for involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and two related charges.
Mansfield is one of 132 teachers whom Pennsylvania authorities have disciplined for sexual misconduct over a five-year period, according to state Education Department data obtained by The Associated Press.
Pennsylvania's figures were gathered as part of a seven-month investigation in which AP reporters sought records on teacher discipline in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
In the aftermath of the popular teacher's arrest, Heather, who turned 18 in September, was forced to endure her classmates' taunts and ostracism. She tried to continue her education at home, at a private school, and in a neighboring school district before she ultimately dropped out. She is trying not to lose sight of her goal to become a nurse.
Guilt occasionally tugs at the heart of Heather's mother, Stephanie Arndt. She regrets not acting on her instincts sooner and wonders why school officials didn't investigate what she now believes were obvious warning signs.
Mother and daughter also have filed a civil lawsuit in federal court, accusing the school district of failing to protect Heather from her abuser and failing to adequately train teachers to spot potential abuse.
Across the country, sexual misconduct allegations led states to take action against the licenses of 2,570 educators from 2001 through 2005. That figure includes licenses that were revoked, denied and surrendered.
Young people were victims in at least 69 percent of the cases, and the large majority of those were students.
Nine out of 10 of those abusive educators were male. And at least 446 of the cases the AP found involved educators who had multiple victims.
There are about 3 million public school teachers in the United States.
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A graduate of Hamburg public schools, Mansfield returned to the rural community 60 miles northwest of Philadelphia to teach in 1994, a few months after he graduated from Shippensburg University. He began as a substitute and transferred to Hamburg Elementary School in 1997.
Heather was assigned to Mansfield's classroom when she entered third grade that fall.
Arndt didn't know much about him, but recalls having a favorable first impression of the young, energetic teacher from her experience as a volunteer "helper mom" at her daughter's school.
"I went in for all the activities and was very involved _ obviously not enough," Arndt, 40, said during an interview in the kitchen of the ranch house she shares with her second husband. "I didn't have any scary vibes from him."
Heather remembers lively games of dodgeball. On occasions when there was free time in class, he would talk to her one-on-one.
"He would talk about what kind of relationship I had with my family," Heather said as she sat next to her mother. "He would find out if I was close to my mom, or if we fought, or where my real dad was at, because he would see at parent-teacher conferences that my stepdad would come in."
Heather and her older brother are Stephanie Arndt's children with her first husband, from whom she was divorced in 1992. Arndt remarried in 1996 and has a 9-year-old daughter with her second husband.
Mansfield declined to be interviewed for this story. In a sworn deposition he gave for the lawsuit, he said Heather "probably rubbed me the wrong way" in the first half of the school year because she had academic and behavioral problems.
They got along better in the second half as she improved in both areas, but the relationship was still "strictly teacher/student," Mansfield said.
"I didn't look at her differently than any other children in the classroom," he said.
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As Heather moved on, she stayed in touch with Mansfield. She would say hello to him in the hallway and sometimes call him at home to chat. At the end of fifth grade, he gave her the "Friends Forever" picture with a note on the back wishing her luck at the middle school.
"He was like my best friend," she said. "I had brothers and sisters that I was close to, but he was more the big brother you could talk to about anything."
In the fall of 2001, Mansfield transferred to the middle school to teach sixth-grade math.
Mansfield said in his deposition that he had previously wanted to work with middle school students, and the school's earlier dismissal time made it easier for him to serve as assistant coach for the high school football team.
As the school year unfolded, Heather would often visit Mansfield's classroom first thing in the morning and at the end of the day, when students were supposed to be in homeroom. She also signed up for "exploratory" periods _ classes where students could pursue various hobbies or activities _ that he conducted.
Around the Christmas break, Mansfield's bogus "tutoring" offer materialized.
"I was doing really bad in math and he called my mom and said he was going to tutor me after school, when really we would just leave school and go to his house," Heather said.
The exits were carefully choreographed. Mansfield would drive around to the rear of the school to pick Heather up at the end of the school day if she didn't have a basketball practice.
He would use a circuitous route of back roads, lest they encounter any familiar faces on the main highways.
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Stephanie Arndt was perplexed at first by the deterioration of her formerly close relationship with her daughter.
Heather became moody and often retreated to her room, where she spent much of her time on the telephone. The purported math tutoring wasn't improving her dismal grades, and she was suspended for skipping band and staying in Mansfield's classroom instead on one occasion.
Mother and daughter entered therapy in the spring of 2002 to try to sort things out.
Arndt began reading her daughter's e-mails with assistance from her son, who knew how to retrieve them from the Arndts' computer. One set off immediate alarm bells, but she had no idea who it was from.
"It said, 'I'm sitting here with candles burning, wishing you were here to hold,'" Arndt said. "I instantly confronted her and she claimed it was some boy from school."
That wasn't enough to assuage Arndt's uneasiness.
Yet Arndt didn't want to believe that there was anything inappropriate about Heather's relationship with Mansfield, and the potential ramifications of making a false accusation bothered her. After all, Mansfield was trying to help her daughter, she thought.
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In July 2002, Arndt finally confronted Mansfield about her suspicions after hearing Heather had invited a man to a house where she was baby-sitting. One of the children spied them together when she woke up to use the bathroom.
"I felt like I was going to snap," Arndt said.
Arndt was accompanied by a friend, who wanted to make sure she didn't do anything rash. Mansfield didn't admit to anything, but was clearly nervous, constantly needing a drink of water, Arndt said.
"He gave one story, one lie after another," said Arndt, who remembers telling him that she was determined to extract a confession from her daughter. "I told him, ... 'If it was you, I won't be back, but the police will.'"
Three days after he was charged, Heather called him from a pay phone at the local pool. She asked him if he was mad, and he reassured her that he wasn't.
"But he said to me, 'You know if you come out and tell everybody what happened, your life's going to be horrible and over because of what people are going to think of you,'" Heather said.
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When Heather entered eighth grade that fall, life at school quickly became a living hell.
Mansfield didn't return to school because he had been suspended, and a group of students and their parents picketed the school in protest, Heather said.
"They had big signs saying 'Free Mansfield'," she said. "I don't think it was so much the kids who were so bad, but they heard their parents talking about everything and judging me."
School officials told Heather to let them know if she was having any problems. Arndt recalled meeting with them on five of the first six days of school to discuss name-calling and other harassment that Heather was subjected to.
But she still couldn't shake off the gossip and insults, even after she entered ninth grade at Hamburg Area High School.
She moved on to a private Christian school, homebound instruction and finally a neighboring school district, but dropped out during her senior year. She was supposed to graduate in the spring.
"I could not sit in a classroom and look at a teacher and have them try to tell me what to do," she said.
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The case didn't go to trial until 2004, shortly after Heather transferred to the private school in ninth grade.
About midway through the trial, Mansfield broke down.
On the witness stand, Heather read some of the e-mails they exchanged. Mansfield wrote, among other things, that he wanted to live the rest of his life with her.
He collapsed outside the courtroom.
"He was so distraught over the evidence that had come out in court ... and the fact that his family was there and he hadn't eaten in a number of days," said his defense attorney, Marc Neff.
Neff had hoped to raise doubts with the jury about whether Mansfield and Heather had physical contact, but knew the e-mails and instant messages were particularly damning. Some of the messages referred to oral sex, and in one e-mail Mansfield described to Heather a dream he had about them having sex at a resort in the Pocono Mountains.
Mansfield entered his guilty plea the next day.
At his sentencing, Mansfield wept, apologized, and claimed that he also was sexually abused as a child. A sex therapist who testified for him identified the perpetrators only as a female relative and a neighbor.
In his deposition for the civil suit, Mansfield said he never told anyone about the alleged abuse until he began seeing a counselor in 2003. He never sought criminal charges.
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As Mansfield serves his time, Heather is trying to move forward, but it hasn't been easy.
"I've gotten a lot better, probably in just the last couple months," she said. "When he had left, I was at square one. I couldn't even walk into a room with people _ I didn't talk to anybody."
Today, Heather lives with her grandparents and works full time as a supermarket cashier. She's hoping to get her GED so she can enter a nursing program.
Mansfield's abuse forced her to grow up fast, she said, but she has grown to appreciate her independence.
"I didn't have my childhood," she said.
Heather and her mother filed their civil lawsuit against the district in 2003, also naming Mansfield and the former principal who ran the middle school when Heather was in the seventh grade. A federal judge sided with the school system in 2006, ruling that officials had no way of knowing about the abuse beforehand.
John Speicher, an attorney for Arndt and her daughter, is appealing to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. He estimates that the psychological toll of the abuse could require hundreds of thousands of dollars of psychiatric care for Heather over the years.
"We thought it was important to get some type of safety net for her," Speicher said. "What you normally find in cases like this is, it's the bad gift that keeps on giving."
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