A former Long Island art teacher accused of sexually exploiting one of his students when she was 17 has been now been arrested for allegedly stalking the same girl.

The female student, now 18, is suing the school district, alleging teacher John Kennedy, 53, groomed and then repeatedly raped her in his own classroom in 2025.

The former Bay Shore High School student called 911 when she allegedly spotted the former instructor after she left her Bay Shore home Thursday morning, the New York Post reported per Suffolk County authorities.

“Suffolk County Police today arrested a high school teacher for stalking a former student that he had sexual affairs with previously,” a spokesperson for the police department told the tabloid.

Kennedy was cuffed at his St. James home Thursday evening, the police representative said.

According to the Post:

Kennedy’s alleged attempts to stalk the girl — who is now 18 — come just barely a week after the unnamed accuser filed a scathing lawsuit against the Bay Shore school district, accusing administrators of failing to protect her from a “serial sexual predator” who routinely raped her in his own classroom, according to court papers.

The ex-educator, who many former and current students once described as their “favorite” teacher, was first exposed by the Post in October for having sex with the 17-year-old student — a senior in his art class at the time — after he was placed on administrative leave over the sordid affair.

However, because the girl was the legal age of consent under New York law at the time of the alleged sexual abuse, the police investigation was closed.

Now, her lawyer Andrew Silvershein argues in the lawsuit that because Kennedy occupied a position of power as a teacher this made the relationship exploitative and the age of consent is irrelevant.

The lawsuit also alleges that the district had an obligation to protect the student from being sexually groomed by the teacher and had ignored warning signs that the grooming was underway — allegations that personal injury attorneys say must be established for a school system to become liable and be hit with damages.

Bay Shore Superintendent Steven Maloney, according to the Post’s reporting, has maintained that the district acted swiftly once it learned of the allegations and immediately placed Kennedy on administrative leave, barred him from campus, and alerted Suffolk police.

The case appears to be one of many that make weekly headlines in what leading experts told an exclusive Breitbart News investigation in March is an epidemic of sex crimes committed by educators in the U.S. over the past two decades.

The Kennedy case is the third high-profile incident involving possible sexual misconduct by Bay Shore teachers, the Post also reported.

In 2017, a teacher’s assistant at the high school was charged with raping a 15-year-old student.

In 2024, the district was ordered to pay $25 million in damages tied to a case involving a retired third-grade teacher who was accused of sexually abusing students for more than three decades. A jury found administrators ignored repeated warning signs.

One of the factors contributing to “rampant” teacher sex crimes in the past three decades is a “culture of permissiveness” among administrators and even fellow teachers who fail to report or accuse their colleagues of suspected grooming or sexual activity so as not to “disrupt the harmony” of a school, experts told Breitbart in March.

Breitbart contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets , which documents one of the worst cases of child sex abuse in U.S. history, and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.