Article content continued

“You’ve suffered real consequences as a result of your conduct,” Webber said. “You’ve given up a career as a result of your conduct. As your lawyer acknowledged, your teaching days are over.”

Cowan-Wilson was a teacher with the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board in 2016 when she was charged for the encounters with the boy, whom she met in 2011 when he was 12 and she was his basketball coach. She was his primary teacher the next year for Grade 8 and the two began sending lengthy text messages to each other.

Photo by Darren Brown / Postmedia

When the boy graduated to Grade 9 in a different school, Cowan-Wilson convinced his mother to let him help coach her basketball team. She would pick him up and drive to a Costco parking lot where she would straddle and fondle him, court heard. She bought him alcohol, sent him photos of her in lingerie and told him she was unhappy in her marriage and that she loved him.

The encounters ended when the boy’s sister found a “love letter” Cowan-Wilson sent him for his fifteenth birthday. The mother went to police.

Cowan-Wilson went on sick leave and later resigned from the school board. She now works as an office administrator and is trying to establish a career as a photographer.

She is still married and is the mother of a six-month-old daughter. The weekend sentence will allow her to remain the main caregiver of the baby.

She wore black slacks and a black jacket in court on Tuesday and answered with a quiet “yes” or “yes, your honour” when asked by the judge if she understood all of the sentence.