For three hours last night, a 17-year-old boy once more told of a relationship at Northeast High School with his then-teacher, Laurie S. Cook, a relationship that he said progressed from friendship to an affair, never varying from his testimony at her trial a year ago.
Jurors did not believe the boy's story, and Ms. Cook was acquitted of child sex abuse. But now she is fighting for her job. Anne Arundel County School Superintendent Carol S. Parham has charged Ms. Cook with four administrative counts of misconduct and recommended that she be fired.
The youth was the second witness to testify in the hearing begun Friday night. The sessions were opened to the public at Ms. Cook's request. Her accuser told hearing examiner William M. Ferris that he met Ms. Cook on his first day of school at Northeast High in the fall of 1991. He was 14 then, a freshman, and she was his science teacher.
The boy said Ms. Cook began making "goo-goo eyes" at him while he sat at his front-row desk two weeks into that school
year.
"It was weird," he said. "It didn't feel like it was a student-teacher relationship any more. Then she put my seat right next to hers, about 5 feet from her desk."
In a voice so soft it was at times barely audible to the 30 hearing room spectators, the teen-ager -- now a senior at a different county school -- said he began visiting Ms. Cook's classroom three to four times a week in the afternoon, after football practice. He said she began offering him rides home, even letting him drive her car the short mile to his house. Eventually, he said, she began giving him access to test questions before she would give an exam.
On visits to the classroom, he said, "we would talk about the future, my plans, my interests, football, girlfriends I had relationships with, and sex. It felt like a guy and a girl talk when they first start seeing each other."
The student said sometimes Ms. Cook would rub his sore shoulders after football practice as they sat talking in the classroom, and that on one such occasion she kissed him for the first time. The relationship progressed after that, to such activities as sexual petting in her classroom, and oral sex in her car, he said.
The boy said Ms. Cook soon was taking him home every evening, and at first was reluctant to enter the house with him. "But later she wanted to come in and meet my family and my parents, and she told me she wanted my parents to get to trust her so if she wanted to take me somewhere else, they wouldn't think it was weird."
He said he ended the relationship because "she was there every minute."
He said that after the arrest of Northeast social studies teacher Ronald W. Price on sex charges, he asked his parents about whether he should talk to the police about Ms. Cook. "My parents said that if someone asked me, I should tell them the truth," he said.
A day after that conversation, he said, a policeman questioned him.
The youth's testimony is to continue at 6 o'clock tonight in the hearing room at school system headquarters on Riva Road, in Annapolis.