He was an influential South Dade teacher. Another ex-pupil accuses him of sexual misconduct

Several months ago, a friend sent her an article about the arrest of former South Dade and Terra Magnet high school teacher Tom Privett Jr. She was floored, and not just because Privett was accused of manipulating an underage student into a long-running sexual relationship on campus in 2016.

He’d done the same thing to her — 32 years earlier, she told the Herald.

Privett, she said, coerced her into months of regular sexual encounters inside his van parked at South Dade High in 1989. Privett, at the time, was in his late 30s and married. She was 17, rebelling against her father, lured by Privett’s seemingly sympathetic ear and offer to smoke pot after class.

“He really had that ability to manipulate and target certain kinds of kids,” said the woman, now 49 and living in the Midwest, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, Lisa. “He easily honed in on the fact that I had a problem with my dad. He definitely took advantage.”

Her account — also given to police and prosecutors — is the latest allegation to surface against Privett, who is awaiting trial in Miami-Dade circuit court. Her story also underscores that investigators believe Privett’s inappropriate and possibly illegal behavior with students stretches back decades.

Privett was an outsized figure at Homestead’s South Dade High, where he spent nearly three decades teaching government, coaching the champion cross-country team and establishing the school’s acclaimed Mock Trial Team for aspiring lawyers.

But interviews with former students and staff members reveal that there were long-standing concerns about Privett’s inappropriate behavior with young female students. Among some faculty, Privett was known as “Teflon Tom” because he seemed to always skate despite suspicions about his conduct, one retired teacher said.

A former student told the Herald that she raised concerns about Privett’s improper relationships with students directly with the school’s principal in 1997, and nothing came of it.

One former journalism student said an image of Privett kissing a girl in the parking lot — captured surreptitiously with a long-zoom lens — sat in a drawer filled with printed photos in the journalism class’ darkroom for years in the early 2000s. The same journalism student, in 2003, wrote a scathing column about Privett after the teacher mocked her weight, an article that apparently raised no eyebrows with the school’s administration.

“He was an absolute slime ball,” said the former South Dade student, Sarah Cochran, who graduated in 2003.

Legal Woes

Privett, now 71, is facing 47 felony counts stemming from the alleged relationship with the teenager at Terra Environmental Research Institute magnet school in 2016. Authorities believe they identified another victim, a woman now in her 30s who was Privett’s student in the early 2000s. But she did not want to cooperate with law enforcement, a Miami-Dade Schools detective testified in April.

“She did not wish to relive it. She is a mother now and a wife now and that was a very traumatizing point in her life,” Detective John Messenger testified.

Lisa is the third suspected victim. While Privett is not charged directly with abusing Lisa, her testimony had been made part of the prosecution’s case and could be used at trial against the former teacher. Lisa asked to be identified by a pseudonym because many people in her life do not know about the incident; the Herald generally does not identify victims of sex crimes to protect their privacy.

In an unrelated legal move, Privett’s lawyer is asking a judge to dismiss some of the felony counts, and a hearing is set for March 1. He has pleaded not guilty.

Privett’s lawyer, Nina Tarafa, did not return requests for comment. Reached at his post-retirement home in Clearwater, Privett declined an interview. “I don’t think it would be in my best interest to talk to you, sir,” Privett told a reporter. “You’re trying to sell newspapers.”

He is but the latest Miami-Dade teacher accused of sexual abuse.

A former Palmetto and Krop high school teacher, Jason Meyers, is still awaiting trial for allegedly having sex with an underage girl in class, one in a series of alleged improper relationships with students. Another one, Brownsville Middle teacher Wendell Nibbs, was recently sentenced to eight years in prison after nine girls alleged sexual misconduct.

As for Privett, the Miami-Dade School District stressed that it had received no complaints about Privett over the years but “continues to encourage anyone who is aware of suspicious activity to report it.”

“There is nothing in the former employee’s personnel files to indicate any allegations of improper behavior involving students,” the district said in a statement.

In the current criminal case, police records portray Privett as a calculated predator who groomed the teenage girl at Terra for years.

Police said he first met the student in 2012 when the girl was in his ninth-grade world history class, and soon began touching her inappropriately. In the girl’s 10th-grade year, Privett began making “rude and disrespectful” comments about the girl’s weight — she eventually developed an eating disorder, according to an arrest warrant, in order to “look good” for Privett.

By 11th grade, police said, the conversations turned explicitly sexual — Privett began talking to her about his “sexual desires” and fetishes. By her senior year, in 2016, Privett had convinced the girl to begin having sex regularly in his classroom, according to police.

After the girl reported Privett to police in December 2019, she called him as detectives secretly recorded. In the call, obtained by the Herald, Privett eagerly begins recalling their sexual encounters in shockingly graphic detail. When the girl mentions she was 17 during their first encounters, Privett pivots into lawyer mode.

“I would never admit to what you just said in a telephone conversation,” Privett says. “Think about it ... Recording devices, and Me Too and um, legal and um, I always think like a lawyer, remember that.”

In a grotesque moment, Privett says he is taking his genitalia “out my pants here” before adding: “You just made a statement you learned in my trial, that would be called a leading question. If I answered it, I would agree to it and I would have then, uh, you’re alleging, I would have committed a crime.”

A Past as a Lawyer

During his decades as a teacher with Miami-Dade County Schools, Privett never missed an opportunity to talk about his former profession as an attorney. But few knew why he left the profession.

Privett was the son of a school teacher in Friendship, Tennessee, and later became a lawyer in the 1970s in Shelby County. Tennessee Supreme Court records show that in 1980, he was suspended for three years after a conviction for unlawful possession of cocaine and improperly influencing the testimony of a witness.

The details of the case are unknown. But an article in 1979 in the Kingsport Times offers a hint at his troubles.

Privett, acting as a secret informant for the state’s attorney general’s office, asked a narcotics detective to sample some cocaine to see “if it would be dangerous for a friend to use,” according to the article.

“I’ve got a little old chick, buddy, and I’m afraid she’s about to get off into something ain’t no good at all,” he said in the recorded call that led to the arrest of a Memphis police officer, the article said.

Privett was ordered suspended from the law less than a year later. He moved to Miami and by 1983 had been hired by Dade County Schools as a teacher.

“We can’t speak to hiring practices dating back nearly four decades ... but the district (today) has strict hiring guidelines that preclude individuals convicted of felonies from being hired,” the district said in a statement.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Privett earned acclaim for coaching cross-country runners to state honors while teaching government, history and debate.

But he earned his most acclaim by starting South Dade’s Mock Trial Team, which competed against legal-studies classes across the state. Year after year, the team won county championships, cross-examining witnesses, staging closing arguments and arguing legal points.

Students recalled Privett was brash and extremely competitive about mock trials, but the class was usually just students, using a microphone, talking about their private lives with the group.

“He wanted to know what everyone was doing. He loved to talk about rumors,” said one former student from the early 2000s who now works as an educator. “Looking back as an adult, I’m astounded this went on the way it did. But he seemed cool to a lot of people.”

Privett, the student recalled, also loved to brag about the “dog-and-pony show” he put on for the school’s administration.

“I’m always really nice to administrators. I buy them plants and they let me slide,” Privett would say, the student recalled.

After 26 years at South Dade, Privett was transferred to Terra in 2009, although exactly why remains unclear. Nothing in the personnel file indicates why he was moved.

More Allegations Surface

After Privett’s arrest in January 2020, Lisa decided to come forward because she believes her story could be valuable for other victims. A mother of two daughters, she says the incident with the former teacher left her susceptible to toxic relationships.

Seven years ago, Lisa returned to school to earn a master’s degree in mental-health counseling. Today, she works with victims of “intimate partner” violence.

“You walk around with this like a heavy weight,” Lisa said. “It’s important to understand it’s not your fault. I spent most of my life thinking it was my fault. It wasn’t. An adult in a position of authority took advantage of me.”

In 1989, Lisa was a student at Homestead High, but had to attend a night class at South Dade to be able to graduate. Privett, she said, first approached her as she waited for her father to pick her up after class. He seemed friendly and curious, she recalled, and they walked to the school’s track to smoke a joint.

“He said, ‘I can’t kiss you because I’ll get in trouble but you can kiss me,’” Lisa recalled.

That began a routine, she said, where Privett began having sex with her in his van, usually after he dismissed class early.

Privett, she recalled, was “weirdly possessive” — admonishing her for helping another male student in class. He always liked to say that his wife was an FBI agent, something she wasn’t sure was true but felt like a veiled threat, she said.

At one point, she mentioned she’d soon be turning 18. “He said something to the effect of, ‘It’s more fun when you’re not 18,’ something really creepy like that,” Lisa recalled.

The relationship ended when the class finished and Lisa graduated. But one last thing happened. Months later, Privett called her home phone and asked to meet at an empty lot near her house. “I had no intention of seeing him again. He was really insistent. I told him, ‘If you don’t go away, I’m going to tell my dad,’” she recalled.

Soon after graduation, Lisa joined the U.S. military, but the experience left her feeling used and embittered. “I felt like if I said anything, I would be blamed,” Lisa said. “I felt like I would be vilified.”

‘Fast Talking Lawyer Type’

After his arrest, other former students also shared their concerns, first on Facebook pages, then in interviews with the Herald. Several said Privett regularly smoked marijuana and did other drugs with students on campus.

Lynn Martinez said she directly raised concerns about Privett’s inappropriate behavior with female students to then-principal Don Hoerschel in May 1997. She said she was prompted to complain because, as a student, she was embroiled in a domestic-violence court case with her then-boyfriend — and Privett went to court to testify against her on his behalf.

“He said there had always been rumors but that he couldn’t confirm it,” Martinez recalled Hoerschel saying.

Hoerschel, who retired in 2009 from the school district after getting in trouble for misappropriating school funds, could not be reached for comment.

Multiple students also recalled in the early 2000s Privett was regularly seen with the same young female student in his red truck, drawing the attention of the journalism students class near where he parked. “He would always walk this student out to his car every day,” said one male student photographer in the class.

Someone snapped the photo and printed it out, leaving it in the darkroom in a drawer. Cochran and others found the photo in 2002.

“It was a black-and-white photo,” she said. “Clearly, it was the student and clearly, it was Mr. Privett.”

In a hallway, Cochran also had a direct run-in with Privett, who “proceeded to tell me just how fat I was, and how I really should come to grips with my obesity.” Encouraged by her journalism adviser, Cochran recounted the episode in a column published a few days later in the student newspaper.

She did not identify Privett by name but called him a “fast talking lawyer type.”

“Everyone knew who it was about. He confronted me in the hallway about it. He was very aggressive. ‘How dare you talk about me like that, you can’t be writing that,’” Cochran recalled. “I cried and said, ‘I’ll write whatever I want.’”

The district, in a statement, said it had not been made aware of the article.

“It is difficult to speak about an article that was published nearly two decades ago,” the statement said. “There is nothing to indicate that this op-ed was part of his personnel file.”

The statement added: “Regardless of how much time has elapsed, cases such as this one cannot be ignored and serve as an opportunity for the District to review and to identify all possible continued improvements to our practices.”

This story was originally published February 1, 2021 at 6:00 AM.