Former coach, elementary teacher Michael Lydiate surrenders teaching certificate over alleged sexual affair with student

A former Muscogee County School teacher voluntarily surrendered his teaching certificate on Thursday after being accused of having a nearly four-year affair with a student, according to officials with the Georgia Professional Standards Commission.

Michael Lydiate, a former elementary school physical education teacher and Hardaway High soccer coach, was under investigation by the commission — which governs teacher certification — after one of his former players alleged he had a sexual relationship with her that began three days after her 16th birthday, ethics director Gary Walker said.

The age of consent in Georgia is 16. In 2007, Columbus High School English teacher James Cypert was arrested and charged with sexual assault against a person in custody after having an affair with an 18-year-old student. He was indicted by a grand jury and sentenced to a year in prison.

In 2009, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in Chase v. The State that “consent of an alleged victim” is “a defense to the crime of sexual assault of a person enrolled in school.”

In light of that decision, a three-month investigation of Lydiate by Columbus Police was closed in November 2009 as non-prosecutable, based on guidance detectives received from the Georgia Prosecuting Attorney Council.

A complaint was filed against Lydiate by the school district on Dec. 16, 2009, and he resigned from the district, where he was employed as a physical education teacher at Johnson and Double Churches elementaries, two days later.

Walker said Lydiate’s information will be put into a national database, so that if he tries to apply for another teaching certificate in another state, his name will be flagged. Lydiate cannot appeal the commission’s decision.

“He’s not going to get it back,” Walker said of Lydiate’s certification.

Another teacher is also under investigation by the Professional Standards Commission for failure to make a required report, Walker said.

According to police reports, Lydiate and the victim had sex at the other teacher’s house at least once.

Police reports

The student said she was a sophomore at Hardaway High, playing soccer for Lydiate, when they started texting and communicating with each other on the computer. They had known each other for several years — he was her sex education teacher in elementary school, according to police reports. She said Lydiate told her she reminded him of his deceased fiancee. She said she looked up to him as a role model and didn’t think there was anything wrong with his interest in her.

“We would text each other; it didn’t cross my mind that it was a bad thing at that point,” she told police. “My friends would say why does he talk to you all the time?”

Lydiate also told police he was close to the girl’s family.

“(She’s) been to my wedding. I told her, hey, how’s your sister, how’s your mother, and so-n-so,” Lydiate told police when they interviewed him about the case in October 2009. “They are like family.”

According to the former student, who is now 21, Lydiate told her she wasn’t like other 15-year-olds, but he refused to have sex with her before her 16th birthday.

“He said he wouldn’t sleep with me until I was 16. We like kissed and stuff before then,” she told police. “He said we couldn’t do that because it was against the law and he could get into trouble.”

She said they had sex the first time three days after her 16th birthday.

“I can tell you the exact date when we began our sexual relationship,” she told police. “It was … the night of the Country’s Barbecue Midnight Run. It was a time when he could get away from his fiancee.” She told police they went over to one of his friend’s house and had sex three times that night.

Over the next three years, they would have sex more than 30 times, she said. Two months after they began having sex, she said, she contracted chlamydia, a common sexually transmitted disease.

“I’ve never been with anyone before that or did anything,” she told police. “I was a virgin.”

She said when she told Lydiate that she had tested positive for the disease, he was upset.

“He got freaked out,” she told police. “He told me that he went to get checked out and he got the treatment and he said when he got the results he didn’t have it.”

He got married, but she said he told her he still wanted to see her and it was only a matter of time before he would leave his wife.

“He was still telling me that he had to marry (her) because people will start asking questions. We slept together the day after he got married.”

The relationship ended in 2008 when she went off to college, according to police reports. She said she realized that he “had lied to her and never had any intention of leaving his wife,” the police report states.

But it would be nearly a year before she told her story to police.

Talking to police

Sometime between December 2008 and January 2009, detective Mark Richards, an investigator with the Columbus police department’s sex crimes division, received an anonymous phone call. The caller initially refused to provide her name and phone number, but said there had been “some type of inappropriate sexual contact between her daughter and an unknown school teacher.”

The woman called Richards several more times over the next several months, eventually trusting the detective enough to reveal her identity and the identity of the teacher she believed had been sexually involved with her daughter — Michael Lydiate, her daughter’s soccer coach at Hardaway High School.

“I’m upset that he’s now moving to another position that places him in direct contact with students, and he will once again have his way with those girls,” the mother told police.

Her daughter had graduated, broken off the affair and gone to college, and had made her mother swear not to tell anyone about Lydiate. Her mother initially refused to give police her daughter’s contact information but said she would ask her if she wanted to come forward.

On Sept. 2, 2009, Richards got a phone call from the woman’s daughter. She said that she and Lydiate had engaged in inappropriate sexual contact while he was her high school soccer coach, and she wanted to file a police report. She said her relationship with Lydiate had been troubling her and though she was still torn over what to do, she hoped Richards could help.

“I have extreme guilt when it comes to this situation and a horrible feeling in my stomach when I have to think about someone else having to go through what I did,” she told police. “I know deep down that I was only a child, and was manipulated, but I seem to partly blame myself. He should not continue to be an authority figure or role model to any impressionable girl. I don’t think he can be trusted.”

She said her mother had also sent a letter to the school board about Lydiate’s having inappropriate sexual contact with students. The anonymous letter, received by the school board on Sept. 4, 2009 and signed “Disgusted Parent of a former Muscogee County student,” said Lydiate was “using impressionable teenage girls in his charge for sexual gratification,” and that the victim had suffered “immense psychological damage from her involvement” with Lydiate.

“… You have got a disaster on your hands that will make the Columbus High/Cypert debacle look like a mad hatters tea party,” the letter stated.

After Lydiate heard about the anonymous letters, he started calling her again, she told police.

“… He basically told me about the letter and wanted to make sure everything was cool and that I hadn’t told anyone. I had several conversations where he talks about the affair. I expect he will call me now every time something like this comes up and he gets scared.”

Anonymous letters

Seven days after the school board received the letter, school district attorney Greg Ellington contacted the sex crimes division to report that he had received an anonymous letter from a “concerned parent” alleging that Lydiate was having inappropriate sexual contact with his students. Police contacted Lydiate at Double Churches Middle School to set up an interview. Lydiate told police that his attorney, Stacey Jackson, would also be present at the interview.

During the interview, conducted on Sept. 23, 2009, Lydiate said every time he attempted to seek a promotion or reassignment in the school district, someone sent anonymous letters trying to damage his career.

He told police he hadn’t told anyone about the anonymous letter. “No, not a soul, except for my wife,” Lydiate told police. Jackson, his attorney, asked who had filed the complaint against Lydiate. The detective gave him the girl’s name and asked him again if he’d contacted any former students after he received the letter.

Yes, he’d contacted the former student, he told police. She had been to his wedding and he tried to get her a job once. He called her and asked about her mother and sister.

“Then I said, ‘This is what’s going on. These letters keep popping up, do you know who could be sending these letters, I sure would like to know, yada-yada-yada and that was basically it,’ ” he told police.

“Mr. Lydiate stated that he has never had any inappropriate contact with any of students because he has never taught any high school classes,” Richards reported at the conclusion of the interview. “Mr. Lydiate reinforced that he has only taught elementary children during his 14 years as a coach. Mr. Lydiate did disclose that he coached girl’s soccer at Hardaway High School from 1996-2005.”

On Oct. 5, 2009, Richards interviewed the former student again, who told police they had sex more than 30 times, including spending one night at a house owned by the other teacher.

When police contacted the teacher on Oct. 13, he said that Lydiate told him he was being investigated by police, but he didn’t say why. Police asked the teacher if he’d ever given Lydiate access to his home in Columbus. He said he and his wife had bought a house and moved to Harris County and that Lydiate had access to his house in Columbus during that time. He would come over, take care of the cats and water the plants, the teacher said, but he didn’t have any exact dates for when Lydiate may have visited.

Meanwhile, the girl started to record her phone conversations with Lydiate. In a recorded conversation sent to police in November, Lydiate told the girl that someone had filed an anonymous complaint against him with the school board. He accused one of the girl’s friends and her mother of “instigating a smear campaign against him with the letter and the complaints.” He asked the girl to stick by him.

On Nov. 17, 2009, police went to Don Cooper, chief of human resources for the Muscogee County School District. According to Cooper, Lydiate was assigned as a teacher at Double Churches Elementary School from 2003-2005, and during this time he also served as a girls soccer coach at Hardaway High.

“This type of split assignment would give Mike Lydiate both supervisory and disciplinary authority over (the student),” the police report states.

But Cooper said Lydiate’s personnel file didn’t contain any derogatory information and only one significant complaint. In the anonymous complaint, a mother reported that Lydiate had provided some of his students with alcohol and marijuana at a local tavern.” The complaint was found to be unsubstantiated, Cooper told police.

In November, a month before the complaint was filed with the school district and Lydiate resigned, police closed the case.

“There is enough probable cause to suggest that this teacher carried on an inappropriate sexual relationship with a former student while he was her teacher,” the report stated. “However, Mr. Lydiate’s attorney has arguably raised a question regarding the strength of his criminal investigation, especially in light of the recent Georgia Supreme Court decision of Chase v. State.”

This story was originally published April 13, 2010 at 12:02 AM.