A former Douglas County teacher faces charges after allegedly starting an inappropriate relationship with a student and taking them from the school without parental permission.

The case marks the sixth incident The Denver Gazette has reported of a teacher or school faculty member allegedly involved in inappropriate behavior with a student in metro Denver since the beginning of 2024.

The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office arrested 44-year-old Tera Johnson-Swartz Thursday on suspicion of kidnapping and contributing to the delinquency of a minor after allegedly starting a relationship with one of her students around Dec. 18, according to arrest records.

Johnson-Swartz — who was a 2025 Colorado Teacher of the Year finalist and English teacher at STEM School Highlands Ranch between 2022 and Feb. 14, 2025 — taught the victim and the two began discussing music.

The gender and age of the juvenile victim were not released in the arrest affidavit.

The teacher asked the student to make her a playlist, and input her number into the student’s phone to share the playlist with her.

“She just put her number in (the phone). A sly little thing, but she put it in and I sent it to her,” the student told detectives. “That’s when we started talking.”

The two began texting frequently, amassing over 2,000 texts. On Jan. 11, Johnson-Swartz bought the student cigarettes and kissed them, according to arrest records.

The two continued talking, though the student told police that they never had any intimate physical contact and were just speaking as friends. The two also had “more intimate discussions,” according to the affidavit.

In one meeting inside Johnson-Swartz’s car, the two discussed that what they were doing was inappropriate and they needed to wait until the student was 18, the victim told police.

Parents or guardians of the student — the actual relationship redacted in the arrest records — met with a detective on Jan. 22 regarding suspicion of the juvenile’s activity.

They told the detective that the student was supposed to attend a school sports game in Aurora, but after tracking the phone, the parents saw the juvenile was at a movie theater in Highlands Ranch.

After getting in trouble, the juvenile gave their phone to the parents or guardians. They searched through the text messages and found around 2,400 deleted texts with Johnson-Swartz, according to arrest records. 

The texts included information about Johnson-Swartz being married with three kids, smoking marijuana and providing the juvenile with cigarettes.

An attorney reached out to the sheriff’s office to say she had been retained as counsel for Johnson-Swartz on Jan. 29.

A few weeks later on Feb. 20, a detective spoke with the juvenile again. The student told the detective that they met up with the teacher again on Feb. 18. Johnson-Swartz picked the student up from school and they drove around discussing the investigation.

The detective contacted the guardians. They told the detective that they were unaware the student had been picked up from the school and had not given Johnson-Swartz permission to take the student from the campus — leading to potential kidnapping charge.

“A former high-school teacher was arrested last night and we are fully cooperating with authorities. The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office notified us of an investigation into this individual on Jan. 21, 2025 and we immediately put her on paid-administrative leave, denying access to our campus, electronic records and students,” Matt Cartier, the school’s chief innovation officer, said in a public statement.

Johnson-Swartz is being held at the Douglas County Detention Facility and is due in court on Feb. 26. She has no prior criminal history.

The arrest comes on the heels of multiple charges and arrests regarding inappropriate behavior between school faculty and juveniles throughout the metro over the past year.

For example: Imagine Kay Ewer, a 28-year-old former Jefferson County paraprofessional, was sentenced to four years in prison at the end of January for sexually assaulting a 16-year-old student.

Ewer’s January 2024 arrest marked the beginning of a string of similar cases in Jefferson County.

Luis Fernando Robles-Luevanos, a family liaison at Creighton Middle School, was arrested in February 2024 for allegedly sexually assaulting children.

Justin Martinez, who worked at several JeffCo schools in afterschool care programs, was arrested in May for an alleged sexual assault on a child. Chloe Castro, a social worker in the district, was also arrested in November on similar charges.

In December, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office announced that it was conducting an investigation into David Weiss, the school district’s chief of schools, that involved possession of child sexual assault material.

Weiss was found dead in Maryland weeks after he was terminated following the criminal investigation.

Then, 55-year-old Christen Cassic of Parker was arrested in Douglas County on Jan. 21, 2025 on suspicion of sexual exploitation of a child and indecent exposure. Cassic was a teacher at Rock Canyon High School.

And finally, the Adams County District Attorney’s Office charged 67-year-old Ulrich Dahm with sexual assault on a child by one in a position of trust earlier this month after he worked as a soccer coach at Aurora West College Preparatory Academy.