BLACKBOARD JUNGLE FEVER: WHITE TEACHERS - BLACK STUDENTS

SC Teachers Accused of Sex With Boys

Arrests of two South Carolina teachers charged with having sex with boys has brought cries of lingering racism. Both women are white. The boys - six in all - are black.

Some black residents who make up more than 25% of the county's 70,000 are upset about the cases. They say the cases reflect the way crimes by whites against blacks in the South were treated less seriously than other offenses, and blacks who leveled accusations against whites were less likely to be believed.

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Jerry Peace, the county prosecutor and a white man, said that the teachers are wearing electronic tracking devices and that their release on bail - $125,000 for one, $110,000 for the other - was only based their danger to the community and whether they were flight risks.

Signs of racial tension remain in Laurens. In the town where one of the teachers taught, one school was for Blacks only, and an old movie theater has been converted into a Ku Klux Klan museum and paraphernalia store called The Redneck Shop. There, folks can buy Confederate flags and bumper stickers depicting three Klansmen that reads "The Original Boys in the Hood."

Wendie Schweikert, a 37-year-old married woman who taught elementary school for more than a decade, was arrested last year after the mother of an 11-year-old boy accused her of having sex with the boy at school at least twice, and at a miniature golf course and arcade in Greenville, about 40 miles away.

Allenna Ward, a 24-year-old minister's daughter in her second year of teaching, is charged with having sex with at least five 14- 15 year old boys were students at the middle school in Clinton where Ward taught. Police say Ward, who is married, had sex with the boys at the school, at a motel, in a park and behind a restaurant.

By KATRINA A. GOGGINS (AP)