Hot for Teacher

Florida English teacher Debra Lafave, once charged with having had an affair with a 14-year-old male student, is back to being a free (and apparently free-spirited) woman. AP reports today that prosecutors dropped the charges after a judge rejected a plea deal that would have kept the teen boy from having to testify.















Let's just get the obvious out of the way: This is one hottie teacher. Debra Lafave is the stuff of Van Halen videos, the stuff of unfulfilled erotic fantasies harbored by just about every heterosexual male boy who ever drifted off during freshman English.

Twisted and depraved criminal? Of course. In need of serious psychiatric help? Sure. But seriously, if the Lafave scenario had popped up in a 1980s' teen exploitation flick (think Private Lessons or Class), it would have stretched the bounds of credibility. According to prosecutors, the teacher and student had sex in the classroom, for Pete's sake. It's enough to make me go back and rethink all those Penthouse Forum letters I scoffed at for years.

As it is, Lafave still faces three years of house arrest and seven years of probation for a difference charge stemming from the case. Even so, the boy's mother is disappointed that this salacious schoolmarm won't be seeing time behind bars. In a recent e-mail to a Florida newspaper, the woman wrote, "There is no one that wanted to see Debra Lafave serve jail time more than myself."

Somehow, I doubt that's true.

I suspect there are several hundred female inmates at Florida's Hillsborough Correctional Institution who might be really disappointed that Ms. Lafave isn't slammer-bound.