Due to the many new and often confusing emotions they experience during their maturation, students may develop strong emotional attachments to faculty and staff. The School’s role in guiding students toward growth as happy, healthy adults and lifelong learners is one of the most rewarding aspects of the work at Geneva. However, this relationship must always be understood and carried out in its proper context.
It is never appropriate for a faculty or staff member to solicit or enter into a romantic relationship of any kind with a student, regardless of whether the student may seek to initiate the relationship or may consider it consensual. This includes deliberate or repeated acts that can be reasonably interpreted as the solicitation by an educator of a relationship with a student that is romantic in nature. A romantic relationship is often characterized by an emotional or sexual attachment and/or patterns of exclusivity; but does not include appropriate educator-student relationships that arise out of legitimate contexts such as familial connections or longtime acquaintance.
Sexual conduct and romantic relationships with students at any KP-12 educational facility is strictly prohibited by Federal and State law. Failure to abide by these guidelines may result in corrective action, up to and including termination of employment for reported infractions.
Violating the trust of students—and their parents—in this way is one of the most serious offenses that one can commit against a student and against the School community as a whole. Accordingly, violation of this policy will result in serious corrective action, up to and including termination of employment.
- Employees are to remember that they serve as professional, adult role models before students (Titus 2:7-8). Relationships between employees and between employees and students are to be friendly and courteous, not familial and intimate.
- Employees are to be careful that any physical contacts and verbal interchanges with each other and with students avoid even the appearance of impropriety (I Peter 2:12).
- Flirtation, sexual innuendoes, casual disrespect toward authority, excessive familiarity, etc. are examples of the kind of unprofessional and inappropriate behavior that will not be tolerated. Necessary and cautionary measures required to limit these kinds of behaviors should be corporately and individually taken.
- Employees are prohibited from using their own personal vehicles for the transportation of students. (limited exceptions may be made by the HOS in writing under certain circumstances).
- On any school-sponsored trips lasting overnight and involving students of both sexes, great care shall be taken to ensure that no impropriety takes place or could be construed to have taken place.