Of course, such regulation must be consistent with the First Amendment.
But there is no question that the First Amendment’s full protections may not be available to a public school teacher. Could a teacher be fired if her image appears fully clothed, but on a webpage devoted to “White Power” or “Racial Purity” – even if she never espoused those ideas in the course of her job? I think it’s pretty safe to say she could be - yet those are activities clearly protected by the First Amendment, too…
Two pictures on the blog were bondage themed to me. The cuffed one in particular. I don’t care about the pics. But I’m not going to lie to myself and think that a school district wouldn’t care about them. How did the students / school district find out about them?
Not really. A teacher anywhere should worry about having naked picture of herself, especially bondage themed ones (the spiked collar shot also has her cuffed hands raised above her head) would fall afoul of most morals clauses.
Care about them, sure. Use them as grounds to drive her out of teaching–sure. There are lots of ways to do that. Not renew her contract, fine. But to cancel her contract that she signed for them–teachers in Texas typically sign multi-year contracts, I am assuming that is the case here–there needs to be more than the idea that it’s inappropriate. If she’d gotton a better offer at a private school mid-year, I doubt they have let her go just because it was a better deal for them. If they want to drive her off, they can. As far as I can see, firing her (and possibly removing her certification) needs stronger grounds than what they have.
And there is a solid artistic tradition involving taking images of sexuality and deconstucting them–the “cuffs” picture could be read as a (rather poor) statement regarding female oppression as easily as it could be seen as attempting to titilate. And the other one isn’t nude.
On the contrary. Just about every public school district requires a credentialed teacher in the classroom. And just about every state teaching credential has various kinds of stipulations about “moral character,” whether on duty at school or not. In California they can revoke your teaching credential just for not notifying Sacramento of your change of address. And if they revoke your credential, no school in the state can hire you, even if they want to.
I realize that it is the school that is dismissing her, and the state credentialing agency probably wouldn’t even have known about the photos because it isn’t a crime, so it wouldn’t come up on a background check. She just had the bad luck that someone associated with the school came across the photos and then notified the school.
With a good lawyer she can probably get re-hired, because the photos are conceivably of “socially redeeming value,” and thereby are not “immoral,” but the administration might make her job difficult, just out of spite, by moving her to a school that’s far from her home, or one that’s underfunded in a poor neighborhood where the students are often more difficult to teach, or just by making her a gym teacher.
The problem with being a schoolteacher - and I have been a schoolteacher before - is that it’s a unique position of trust. Not only do you deliver didactic instruction, but you are also acting to some extent in loco parentis and are a source of moral values through your words and actions. Everything you do publicly is subject to scrutiny because a child may emulate you. It is sort of a prison in a way, but it’s in your contract and you are warned adequately when you sign up.
As for these photos… well, I’d be fine with topless artistic nudes, certainly. Even full-body frontals in non-suggestive poses. Some of these photos are artistic nudes, but some of them are clearly fetish erotica. Handcuffs, dog collars, etc. Also, 2 of the shots are crotch close-ups with labia clearly the focus of the shot. It was posted in a public place, as well. So I would say the photos need to be taken down and she should be reprimanded for violating the terms of her employment. I don’t think she should be fired, though, as it was not as extreme as it could have been.
This is the issue at heart. If it was a student that found out about the pictures, then already that student was “corrupted,” one could argue, and I doubt the student would go running to the principal with the news. But how did the administration find out? Obviously someone in the administration was either looking at pictures of naked people, and came across them, or had it out for her (possibly because she’s gay). If they really valued her as a teacher, the best action would be to quietly call her in and ask her to remove the photos from the website. They might ask her to go to a another school.
But school principals and vice-principals (administrators) are usually idiots, who were originally teachers, but couldn’t hack it, and wanted to make more money, but who also don’t really care about keeping a good teacher. They just want to cover their ass so they can keep their cushy administrative job that any idiot could do. If you want to see a public school administrator jump through the roof, just sneak up behind them and whisper the word “lawsuit.”
That’s what this is all about. If they had only just gotten the pictures off the net as soon as possible, and transfered the teacher, they could have avoided all the hubbub, and kept a good teacher.
I suspect one of her colleagues is behind all of this, someone who has something against her.
Extremely petty, IMHO, and in bad taste on the part of the teacher.
Thank you, Bricker, as always for your legal insight. I can see your point, although I question comparing topless photos to right wing ideas. Still, if this all comes down to the legalities, I admit I’m standing on shakey ground.
Meh, I hope she gets her job back, and I hope the Texas public school system doesn’t go overboard on this sort of thing.
“The photos came to light last month as a result of a feud over ceramics equipment with another art teacher, according to sworn affidavits. Students who had seen the pictures showed the teacher, who then notified school officials.”
I wonder if the she let it be known to her students where these photos were located?
"Hoover said Friday the photos are art and makes no apologies.
“I’m an artist and I’m going to participate in the arts,” Hoover said. “If that’s not something they want me to do then I want to be told that. I don’t feel as if I was doing anything that was beyond expectations.”"
I wonder if it was a case of her not being apologetic about it and refusing to take them down that escalated the situation to where it is now?
I agree with this. What is so terrible about posing nude? She wasn’t doing hardcore anal penetration, she wasn’t espousing lunatic extremist views, and she wasn’t aiming anything at highschoolers. At the worst, this is going to be a disruptive influence, and as I’ve said, I wouldn’t have a problem with her being relieved because she couldn’t handle the class, but the biggest story here is the school board’s overreaction to the whole situation.
Well the bondage shots seem to push the envelope a bit on the porn side. If you’re putting naked pictures of yourself on the interenet and you’re in a public teaching position with morals clause in your contract, then you’re certainly playing with fire.
I don’t know if it’s post “getting in trouble over being naked on the internet”, but she had a Myspace.com site with picture links there and in Flickr. tamara hoover (mshoover) on Myspace The more that I look at this; it seems like her being caught for posting naked pictures of herself on the internet was inevitable. Two of them that appeared on the blog were clearly bondage oriented. There might have been more and more graphic ones? She must have forgot about “base, vile, or depraved acts that are intended to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of the actor.” part of her contract or simply didn’t care.
Well, for a school administrator, or anyone in the pedagogy business, that may well be an overriding concern. If I were an administrator, I’d worry, given the dominant prejudices of her students, about how thoroughly student respect for her would be lost. In that position, I’d be worried about student attitudes; a lot of supervisors would try to head it off at the pass. I’d probably wait a little while to see if it blew over, & if she were being harassed, I might have to replace her. But I wouldn’t try to remove her right to teach elsewhere.
We tend to forget: Public high students tend to treat teachers with disrespect generally. And the teacher who poses nude outside her job may not be the one with the least effective discipline or teaching.
Do morals clauses actually define what it immoral?
The title of this post made me think this was about a teacher who went topless in the presence of her students. What she did was not illegal. And about the pro-marijuana rally; if she were to actually smoke marijuana then that would be a problem, but there is nothing wrong with expressing her views. Especially when she’s not on the job.
So, your debating point is “well, it is Texas she should have known better”? Okay, you won’t support your point other than to say you feel that she violated a morals clause because you felt the pictures were sort of pornographic?
The old, ‘it’s just Texas’ gambit. Tried and true arguement of people who have no idea of what Texas is really like.
If posing in the nude for a work of art violates a morals clause for a teacher in Texas and could cause her to lose her Texas State Teaching Certificate, then all nude modelling should be banned immediately from art classes at Texas State Universities as this practice promotes acts of immorality.
Right?
And in our desire to keep teachers pillars of the community, let’s have a few of the sort that Emerson wrote about – the noncomformists, the ones who depend on the integrity of their own minds. And Emerson’s friend Thoreau talked about marching to the beat of a different drummer.
Why does every American lit class teach these essayists if their words are, after all, irrelevant?
The last that I heard, Andrew Wyeth’s Helga was still living in Pennsylvania. I believe there were some topless portraits of her. Can you imagine banning her from teaching in an art class?
I haven’t made my mind up about this particular case, but you should know there is a great deal more latitude given to college instructors than high school. The “but they do it in college” argument doesn’t fly.