Encounters with student net jail time for teacher
Disgraced elementary teacher Kyla Cowan-Wilson will spend her first night behind bars on Friday when she begins serving the first weekend of her 90-day jail sentence for having sexual encounters with one of her students.
Cowan-Wilson will also spend two years on probation, must register with police as a sex offender and submit a sample of her DNA to the National DNA Databank.
Ontario Court Justice Matthew Webber delivered the “lenient” sentence to the 34-year-old former public school teacher Tuesday after a joint submission from the Crown and her lawyer.
“As a community we can’t have a teacher breach the trust of our young people,” Webber said.
Webber described the sentence as “a lenient one” but within the acceptable range for the offence of a single count of sexual assault. Charges of sexual interference and sexual touching were dropped in May when CowanWilson pleaded guilty.
“You’ve suffered real consequences as a result of your conduct,” Webber said. “You’ve given up a career as a result of your conduct. As your lawyer acknowledged, your teaching days are over.”
Cowan-Wilson was a teacher with the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board in 2016 when she was charged for the encounters with the boy, whom she met in 2011 when he was 12 and she was his basketball coach. She was his primary teacher the next year for Grade 8 and the two began sending lengthy text messages to each other.
When the boy graduated to Grade 9 in a different school, Cowan-Wilson convinced his mother to let him help coach her basketball team. She would pick him up and drive to a Costco parking lot where she would straddle and fondle him, court heard. She bought him alcohol, sent him photos of her in lingerie and told him she was unhappy in her marriage and that she loved him.
The encounters ended when the boy’s sister found a “love letter” Cowan-Wilson sent him for his 15th birthday. The mother went to police.
Cowan-Wilson went on leave and later resigned. She now works as an office administrator and is trying to establish a career as a photographer. She is still married and is the mother of a six-month-old daughter. The weekend sentence will allow her to remain the main caregiver of the baby.
Her lawyer, Solomon Friedman, said Cowan-Wilson offered her “deep remorse and regret” for her actions and had an “extremely high prospect of rehabilitation.”
Cowan-Wilson’s victim, whose name is protected by a publication ban, was too distraught to be in court, his mother said. But according to a victim impact statement delivered at Cowan-Wilson’s guilty plea, the now 19-year-old has suffered profoundly with anger, guilt and shame since the encounters.
“This process isn’t over today for (my son) and our family,” his mother said outside court on Tuesday. “There is a lifetime of healing ahead for us.”