DEARBORN, Mich. — Sometimes it feels as if the internet is so chock-full of porn that smutty videos and images are lying in wait, just trying to burst through our safe-for-work online doings. One unfortunate substitute teacher in Dearborn, Michigan, definitely felt that way earlier this month when he attempted to show an history video to his seventh-grade students…and accidentally gave them an education of a very different kind. Instead of a presentation on Lewis and Clark, the middle school students were treated to what The Detroit News reported as “thirty to forty-five seconds” of porn.
O.L. Smith Middle School Principal Zeina Jebril told news outlets, “The substitute teacher was immediately removed from the class and interviewed by myself and our school resource officer.” But it doesn’t appear that the teacher accessed the smut knowingly. He was using the school’s computer to access an online video, and he hadn’t been searching for porn on another tab.
The school district’s communication director, David Mustonen, told the Detroit Free Press that “The substitute teacher that was in the classroom was unaware that this video was there.” Further investigations have revealed no evidence that it was a student prank or a criminal act, either.
The school sent home notes with the twenty-nine students who were exposed to the smut and provided support for any trauma they may have experienced, Fox News reported. Now the school district, whose massive computer system experiences millions of log-ins per week, will now “advance their filtering software to ensure the incident does not occur again.”
The substitute teacher in question will likely never work in the Dearborn school system again, the principal told The Detroit News. That feels a bit unfair to us, since neither police nor school administration have found any evidence that this was the teacher’s fault. But then again, if we were him, we’d never want to face those students again, either.
Dark classroom stock photo by Emmanouel V.
