In just two years, a former Southern California educator has taken a steep fall from “teacher of the year” to a 30-years-to-life prison term for sexually abusing two of her sixth-grade students.
A Chula Vista Superior Court Judge in San Diego County Friday sentenced Jacqueline Ma, 36, to the prison term after she pleaded guilty in February to two counts of forcible lewd acts on a child, one count of lewd acts on a child, and one count of possessing child sexual abuse material.
Only two years ago, Ma was being featured on local television explaining “how she connects with distracted students.”
On Friday, she was on TV again, this time addressing the Court.
“I abused my authority, I exerted my power and control over them, and I deceived them,” Ma said while handcuffed and crying. “Boys this age should be playing outside, feeling carefree … I ripped away their childhood.”
Her sentencing statement, carried in part by Fox 5 in San Diego, also included an apology to the victims and their families. She called her crimes “selfish” and that she had “disgraced the teaching profession.”
According to police and the district attorney’s office, Ma had groomed young boys with “gifts, food and special attention and even completed their homework for them.”
Prosecutors said Ma groomed one boy for over a year before she sexually assaulted him in her classroom over a period of three months while his parents believed he was in an after-school basketball program.
Further investigation into Ma revealed that she had targeted and sexually assaulted a second victim, an 11-year-old boy in 2020, according to the district attorney’s office.
The assault was well before Ma was named San Diego County “Teacher of the Year” for the 2022-2023 school year. She had been a teacher with the National School District since 2013.
Ma will not be eligible for parole until 2055, one of her prosecutors said. District Attorney Summer Stephan said the sentence was a just one, adding:
This defendant violated the trust she had with her students in the most extreme and traumatic way possible and her actions are despicable. Her victims will have to deal with a lifetime of negative effects and her 30-year sentence is appropriate.
Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times bestseller “House of Secrets,” which documents one of the worst sexual child abuse cases in U.S. history, as well as four other nonfiction crime books. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
