SHE was a Hunter high school teacher in a position of authority and entrusted with keeping all of the students at her school safe.
But over a four-month period between late-2018 and early-2019, Katie Smith, a then 26-year-old PE teacher, repeatedly and "egregiously" breached that trust.
She groomed a 14-year-old boy, friending him on Snapchat where they exchanged sexually explicit images and videos and arranged to meet him in an empty classroom and in the school holidays so they could kiss and she could expose herself and indecently assault him.
As Judge Kara Shead said on Friday, Smith exploited the student's vulnerability and immaturity and manipulated him into deleting the images and keeping her crimes a secret.
And then after she was spoken to by police, Smith first lied about how a sexually explicit video of her came to be circulating around the school and later minimised her involvement in their "relationship", denying the pair had ever kissed and deflected blame onto the teenage boy.
She knew it was wrong, she knew he was underage and yet it was not until the boy rebuffed her advances that the grooming and sexual abuse stopped.
"The passing of time gave her the opportunity to desist but again and again she chose to pursue him with the desire to procure him for sexual activity," Judge Shead said.
Smith, who can be named for the first time after a court order lapsed after she was sentenced, was on Friday jailed for a maximum of three years and 10 months, with a non-parole period of two years and three months.
She will be eligible for parole in December, 2022, when she will leave jail a registered sex offender.
It was a complex sentencing exercise for Judge Shead, who had to weigh up Smith's serious conduct over a period of four months against her complex and troubling psychological background.
At the heart of Smith's offending was her "addiction and obsession" with gaining the attention of others, especially males, which led to impulsive and reckless behaviour. Judge Shead accepted she had a desire for attention rather than sexual gratification.
"Her sexual behaviours appear to be motivated by seeking attention and reassurance from males and she would seek to know that they were sexually aroused," Judge Shead said. "She distinguished this from actually having sex with them."
In the case of the teenage boy, Smith said she hated the word "grooming".
"I didn't intend to have sex with him, I just wanted to be told I was pretty," Smith said.
Smith, who sobbed in the court dock throughout Friday's sentence proceedings, had pleaded guilty to grooming a child for unlawful sexual activity, indecent assault on a person under the age of 16 and intentionally sexually touching a child between the age of 10 and 16.
I didn't intend to have sex with him, I just wanted to be told I was pretty.
Former Hunter PE teacher Katie Smith said in relation to grooming and indecently assaulting a teenage boy, who was a student at her school.
