#Texas teacher charged with having sex with 15-year-old student

A Texas teacher is charged with having sex with a 15-year-old male student — just months after she started working at a high school, court records show.

Hailey Pardy, a 25-year-old former math teacher at Bastrop High School, was arrested Thursday by Round Rock police following her indictment by a grand jury for allegedly having an improper relationship with a student, a second-degree felony, the Austin American-Statesman reports.

Pardy, then 23, had sex with the teen student on Dec. 1, 2018, police said.

Administrators at the public school then got an anonymous tip some nine months later — in August 2019 — about the alleged sexual relationship between the pair and Hardy was put on paid administrative leave the same day, the newspaper reports.

She was later fired by the Bastrop school board by an unanimous vote in November.

Pardy, of Shiner, started working in the school district in August 2018 — just months prior to the alleged incident. She was earning an annual salary of $48,383, school district documents show.

“The action of this teacher does not represent the more than 1,300 caring, dedicated and talented educators who make up Bastrop ISD,” district spokesman Kristi Lee said. “The foundation of the teacher-student relationship is one of trust, and when that trust is violated, it angers and saddens us.”

Pardy graduated from Texas State University in 2018 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and won the Texas State Academic Distinction Award for math that same year, according to a 2018 report in the Shiner Gazette.

Pardy was released from the Bastrop County jail after posting $100,000 bond, the Statesman-American reports. It’s unclear if she’s hired an attorney. If convicted, she faces up to 20 years in prison.