A Texas jury handed a former middle school teacher 33 years in prison this week for sexually abusing a 13-year-old student — and every parent in America should be asking why she was in that classroom to begin with.

Adriana Rullan, 30, was convicted of continuous sexual abuse of a child under 14 at Gonzalez Middle School in Laredo. Jurors also hit her with 10 years for indecency with a child and 13 years for an improper educator-student relationship, the sentences running concurrently with $20,000 in fines, according to the New York Post. The jury needed less than two hours to reach a verdict. The victim, who was 13 when the abuse occurred, told the court it cost him his friendships, his sense of self, and nearly his life. His mother called Rullan manipulative and said she should never be allowed near another child.

Justice done. But Rullan's conviction is the end of one story and the beginning of a much harder one.

In the same week, three other cases surfaced that show the same institutional rot. In Georgia, biology teacher and football program administrator Maris Nichols, 25, was indicted on 27 counts involving six students at Alexander High School — two of them under 16 — after investigators discovered she operated an OnlyFans account that students found and used to blackmail her for better grades, Fox News reported. Search warrants were served on OnlyFans, Snapchat, and AT&T. Nichols had been on house arrest with electronic monitoring but violated bond conditions so many times she had to turn herself in.

In Minnesota, cross-country coach and teacher Sutton Thomas Junkermeier, 26, was charged with three counts of harassment — two felonies — after allegedly sending explicit Snapchat images to a 16-year-old female student. FOX 9 reported that when confronted, Junkermeier admitted, "his penis may have been in a few of the images that were sent." He also told the girl, "We best not tell anyone about this" and "I know last night got a little crazy but let's keep this between us." He's on leave. His next court date is September.

And in Florida, the institution didn't just fail to stop a predator — it actively ran interference. Principal Michael Townsend was arrested for failing to report child abuse after teacher James Mulvey, 47, was charged with a second-degree felony for offenses against students at Baldwin Middle-Senior High School, Us Weekly reported. When students brought Townsend a photo of Mulvey holding hands with a student, he called it "fatherly love" and claimed the girl was Mulvey's "adopted daughter." He didn't ask for a copy of the photo. He didn't take written statements. Another teacher who reported concerns said she was "blown off." Townsend even texted a parent that he was "a little worn out on the subject" — as if protecting children was an annoyance on his schedule. The victim's mother told authorities Townsend never contacted her and she would never have approved of the relationship.

Four cases. Four schools. Four predators who walked through the front door with credentials and access to children. What background checks were run? What red flags were missed? What hiring protocols exist — or don't — that let a woman with an OnlyFans account teach biology to teenagers, or a principal who calls a grown man holding a child's hand "fatherly love" stay in charge of a building full of kids?

The sentence in Laredo is righteous. But 33 years for one predator doesn't fix the system that handed her the keys to a classroom. Parents aren't sending their kids to school to become prey. Until administrators face real consequences for looking the other way, and until districts are forced to answer for who they hire and how they vet them, the next Rullan is already on somebody's payroll.