Teacher told to resign after pupil steals her nude picture

[Xithras]

11. You know, as a former teacher, I'm going to have to take a dissenting view on this one.

Bringing pornography (including amateur homemade pornography) onto school grounds is prohibited in just about every school district in the country. Kids are immediately suspended for posessing it, and is considered a fireable offense in most school districts for teachers to bring it onto school property. By leaving the phone in the drawer, without a lock on the drawer or a password on the phone, the teacher left prohibited contraband in a location where it was directly accessible to the students. At a minimum, it was an incredibly stupid move. In most districts, it's going to bring serious sanctions.

Look at this a bit differently. If this was a male teacher, and the kids opened the unlocked drawer to find a stack of Playboy magazines sitting in an insecure pendaflex marked "Private and Personal", would we go so easy on him? Probably not. Most people would come down on him like a ton of bricks for having prohibited pornographic materials in a location where kids can easily find it in a classroom. The fact that the teacher is a woman, or that the photos were digital instead of print, are irrelevant to the point at hand. She brought porn into a classroom and failed to secure it away from her students.

The students should absolutely be punished for digging through the teachers desk, but the school district isn't out of line for sanctioning the teacher as well.