Monique Ooms: High School teacher walks free after sex with student
A teacher cried as she learnt she would not be jailed for having sex with her underage student.
A teacher has walked free after admitting to having sex with a 16-year-old student.
Monique Ooms, 31, returned before the Court of Appeal on Tuesday after prosecutors appealed her non-custodial sentence on child abuse offences, arguing it was “manifestly inadequate”.
Sitting in the dock with the hand of a supporter on her shoulder, Ooms began to cry as a panel of three justices dismissed the appeal finding a four-year community corrections order was appropriate.
Ooms had just become a teacher at Sale Secondary College last year, when she began exchanging messages with a male student in late May after noticing the boy was going through personal issues.
What initially started out as exchanges of support progressed to Ooms sending pictures of herself in her underwear to the victim before the student snuck out of his home and met up with his teacher for the first time in July 2022.
The pair had sex several times over that month and into early August at her home and in her car at various locations before an anonymous letter was sent to the school.
Earlier this year she pleaded guilty to four counts of sexually penetrating a child under her care, supervision or authority.
She was sentenced in the County Court in March this year to a community corrections order with 300 hours of community work and counselling by Judge John Smallwood.
Judge Smallwood found that while the relationship was “utterly inappropriate”, he did not find Ooms’ conduct to be predatory.
“It was simply a situation where neither of you was thinking particularly straight and you were the one with the responsibility, not him,” he said.
The boy told police Ooms was “very nice” and he believed she “genuinely had feelings for me”.
Previously, the court was told Ooms became the subject of abuse and anonymous phone calls and had been forced to hide from her community.
Her lawyer, Jason Gullaci SC, said she has been suffering from mental health issues and had fallen pregnant shortly after her sentence was handed down in March.
In their judgment, Judges Richard Niall, Maree Kennedy and Cameron Macaulay said they had not been persuaded the sentence imposed was manifestly inadequate.
“This was a difficult sentencing exercise,” they wrote.
“The offending was serious and, as the judge correctly noted, ordinarily a custodial sentence of some duration would be expected in order to fulfil the sentencing purposes.
“But the judge considered this to be a very unusual situation... It is a conspicuous example of a judge concerned to do individualised justice and to exercise the judicial sentencing discretion to do justice in the particular case.”