Out Of State Contractor That Hired Queer Prostitutes For Special Ed Doesn’t Require Child Abuse Background Checks In Tennessee

Image Credit: @Instagram/ezra_mal & Exceptional Student Services of Arizona / LinkedIn

The Tennessee Conservative [By Paula Gomes] –

The out-of-state contractor that hired queer prostitutes to sub in special education classes in Hamilton County doesn’t require child abuse background checks in Tennessee.

Hamilton County uses Exceptional Student Services (ESS) to hire substitute teachers, a company based out of Arizona. According to information sent to us from a Hamilton County resident, ESS requires minimal background checks for potential hires in Tennessee compared to other states.

Sources tell us that Hamilton County Schools has an “epidemic of sexual abuse by teachers, specifically substitutes and special education teachers.”

In January, a gym instructor at a Chattanooga YMCA allegedly inappropriately touched two girls who were minors at the YMCA. Robert Hardeman, 53, who was also employed as a special ed teacher at East Hamilton Middle School was arrested and charged with aggravated sexual battery.

Hardeman had been an exceptional education inclusion teacher since 2005 according to the Hamilton County school district.

In March, Duane Sanders, 45, who worked as a first-grade teacher at Wallace A. Smith Elementary School in Ooltewah was arrested on sexual abuse charges that involved multiple minors. At the time of his arrest, Sanders was under investigation by Tennessee Department of Children’s Services.

Sanders was recognized as a “HCS Hero” in April 2021. He began working for Hamilton County Schools in 2009 as a substitute teacher, later becoming an educational assistant in 2014 and a certified teacher three years after that.

Over the course of his teaching career, Sanders worked or volunteered at a total of 5 Hamilton County Schools. These were Wallace A. Smith Elementary, East Brainerd Elementary, Westview Elementary, East Side Elementary and Wolftever Elementary.

Sanders currently has 19 charges against him involving 12 male children. These include aggravated rape of a child, aggravated sexual battery and continuous sexual abuse of a child.

Before his last court date, Judge Barry Steelman ordered Sanders to be on house arrest and to have no contact with young children, with the exception of his own. He is now out on bond and expected back in court in December.

The Hamilton County Sheriff’s office took Casey McGrath, 28, into custody on August 18th and charged her with aggravated statutory rape. A 10th-grade Geometry teacher, McGrath was suspended without pay back in March after she was suspected of having had “inappropriate physical contact” with a student who attended Central High School in May 2022. The victim was between 13 and 18 at the time. McGrath had worked at the school since 2020, and received a “Teacher of the Year” award in 2021.

Last year, a 60-year-old veteran teacher was arrested after it was discovered that she had been sexually abusing a 12-year-old for at least 7 months. Deborah McCarty who worked at the Chattanooga Charter School of Excellence at the time of the abuse, was charged with child molestation, enticing a child for indecent purposes, obscene phone contact with a child, and sexual assault by a person with supervisory or disciplinary authority. The abuse spanned from May to December of 2021.

McCarty had previously worked for Walker County Schools in Georgia where she was employed at Chattanooga Valley Elementary School. She retired in 2016 after a nearly 30-year career with that district.

Children’s Advocacy Center Executive Director Kristen McCallie, says that Hamilton County has experienced a record high number of sexual abuse cases involving children from July 2021 to June 2022 – 887 instances on record.

“Sexual abuse as a whole is a vastly underreported crime,” McCallie stated. “Just generally, for every one case that’s reported, there’s five that are typically not. And that’s a national statistic.”

Hamilton County paid ESS a total of nearly $7 million in 2020 alone for their services in acquiring substitute teachers for the district.

About the Author: Paula Gomes is a Tennessee resident and reporter for The Tennessee Conservative. You can reach Paula at paula@tennesseeconservativenews.com.