Totally missed this until I saw it mentioned in the Era’s article today - apparently the Philly Inquirer ran a piece last weekend on the rash of “Inappropriate student-teacher relationships in Lititz“:

In a town founded as a Moravian religious enclave more than 250 years ago, residents insist the cluster of teacher-student sex scandals is an anomaly and not any kind of scarlet letter on its civic character. But the disclosures are the whispered talk of this town of Victorian homes, pretzel makers and chocolate factories, population 9,000 - named a “distinctive” U.S. destination this year by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

“I haven’t seen anything like it, and I’ve been here since 1991,” Lancaster County District Attorney Craig Stedman said.

This cluster is unusual. As was, a few years back, the cluster of high-profile murder cases that took place in the county (the Nickel Mines shooting, the Ludwig/Borden case, the Jesse Dee Wise Jr. case in Leola, the Haines case).

There might not be anything in the water. There might be something in the psychological makeup of this county, though. The parochialism; this notion that our conservative piety somehow protects us from things such as this.

While federal data indicate that reported sex crimes against young people have fallen since the 1990s, there are no specific data for what goes on in schools, said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.

Warwick’s cases “certainly seem like a lot,” Finkelhor said.

The biggest question, maybe, is whether our parochial, resentful nature will permit us recognize that.