Council candidate quits race over relationship with student

EVANSVILLE, Ind. (AP) - A candidate for the Evansville City Council on Tuesday suspended his effort and pledged not to serve if elected after admitting to having a sexual relationship with a student while he was a high school teacher in the 1970s.

Jack Schriber suspended his campaign after the Vanderburgh County Republican Party withdrew its support for his candidacy. The party took the action shortly after Republican Mayor Lloyd Winnecke said he had asked County GOP Chairman Wayne Parke to "take the necessary actions" to end Republican Schriber's candidacy for an at-large seat.

Winnecke said Schriber's "actions are inexcusable."

Schriber announced the suspension of his election effort in a post on his campaign's Facebook page, the Evansville Courier & Press reported (http://bit.ly/1QQnYqj ).

"Unfortunately, I have become a distraction to an important political election for our city. ... So today I am suspending my campaign for City Council At-Large. While it is too late to withdraw from the ballot, if elected, I will not serve and I will leave the selection of my replacement to a caucus," he said in the post.

Schriber couldn't immediately be reached by The Associated Press for comment.

Parke confirmed that if Schriber were elected, the party will ask him to resign and will seek to appoint a successor.

Schriber told the newspaper the relationship occurred when he was an English teacher at Central High School in the mid-1970s. He said the student was 17 or 18 at the time.

However, the victim told the Evansville Police Department that he was between the ages of 15 and 17 when he was "coerced into a nonconsensual sexual relationship" with Schriber that lasted more than two years.

The victim went to police on July 20. A police report says he told investigators that he felt he could not end the relationship with Schriber at the time without suffering penalties to his academic and extracurricular activities.

Schriber said he was aware that allegations of inappropriate behavior on his part had been investigated by police.

"I am not trying to minimize my responsibility. I know this will ruin me professionally, politically and personally," Schriber said.

Vanderburgh County Prosecutor Nicholas Hermann said his office received the investigation file from police last week and determined the statute of limitations for any charges had run out.

Schriber said the allegation did not surface until he announced he would run for City Council.

He said a person from Holly's House, an Evansville victim advocacy center, and two police detectives came to his house to talk to him about it. Schriber said the detectives and the Holly's House representative told him that they had heard from a former student of Schriber's who expressed concerns about the relationship.

Schriber said he wrote a letter of apology to the student at the suggestion of one of the detectives.

Schriber worked in the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corp. as an English teacher and supervisor of fine arts from 1970 until his retirement in 2007. He currently is an adjunct professor of communications at the University of Southern Indiana.

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Information from: Evansville Courier & Press, http://www.courierpress.com