So a male teacher leaving a copy of Playboy on his unattended desk isn’t a problem?
Is it covered in such a way that the student has to go snooping through the desk to find it? If so, then no, I don’t think that’s a problem. If it’s laying out, making it impossible for people to not see it, I think that’d be a problem for any workplace–people shouldn’t have to see things like that if they don’t want to.
ETA: Every phone with internet access has naked ladies almost as accessible as these naked lady pics were. Seriously. If they’d used her phone to look up naked ladies, would that be her fault, too? It’s pretty predictable that teenagers with internet access will look for boobs.
The nature of the information is irrelevant - the question is whether or not reasonable measures were taken to prevent access to the information by someone who shouldn’t. An unsecured, unattended electronic device is generally not considered adequately securing information, while a device with a password either is (or at least is the baseline). It doesn’t seem that you consider it reasonable to secure data from someone with ‘well, it’s on my device, so they shouldn’t look at it, I did nothing wrong if they do’.
Teachers have a ‘duty’ not to provide students with naked pictures of themselves, which is what the teacher did by putting pictures on an unsecured device and leaving it where the kids had physical access.
Wait, hold up. Let’s be clear. It’s TOTALLY a problem for a teacher to bring a porn mag to school. That’s not okay.
A phone is different from a skin mag, though. A phone is a general-purpose device that may, among many other uses, have sexy pics on it. The sexy-pics purpose doesn’t have a place at school, but most of the other purposes of a cell phone do.
A skin mag is pretty much a single-purpose item, and that purpose doesn’t have any place at school.
That said, I’ve sat through more than one staff meeting where they warned us that we could be fired for any reason at all. We’ve been intimidated with stories about teachers whose Facebook pages had pictures of them drinking giant margaritas in Cancun and they got fired for immoral activity. If you don’t live in the South, you may not fully appreciate just how shitty teachers are treated here.
No, the nature of the information does matter. If private, confidential information about a third party gets out, that’s hurting someone who trusted the system to protect them. There is a victim.
She didn’t provide them, she failed to secure them. And since when is it a teacher’s job to protect students from seeing naked images of herself or of anyone? Not provide them, yes. I’ve read my contract. No where does it say I have to be the morality police.
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Playboy isn’t a skinmag anymore. It’s more like Maxim. And I don’t think I’d want to see a teacher fired for having a Maxim in their bag or otherwise concealed. It’s not a great practice, but it’s not worth firing someone over.
I’m assuming here the analogy was to old Playboy–otherwise it doesn’t make sense. Let’s say it’s some other magazine with nude pictures: do you agree that’s not an appropriate thing to have at work, setting aside the question of whether it’s a firing offense?
Sorry, I should have clarified: yes, I was thinking of the older version of Playboy - the one featuring whole-body nudity.
Yes, it’s inappropriate, with layers of inappropriate based on how concealed it was–if a teacher was going on an overnight trip and had a porn magazine in the bottom of a suitcase they left under their desk, it wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow for me. If they are flipping through “Schoolgirls do Anal” where kids can see them, it’s a big fucking deal.
This situation is closer to the former than the latter, to me.
The photo was not on her lock screen, the student had to go through it to the her app, find a pic, and then take a pic of that.
That is a level of interaction far in excess of casually seeing a skin mag on the desk.
If she had left her wallet on her desk, and the student walked up and took out $100 - the student would be a thief.
If she had left her car door unlocked in the parking lot, and the student stole a phone charger - teh student would be a thief.
The teacher was dumb (lack of a lock screen) - but that does not excuse the person who chose to victimize her. We should not punish people for making themselves easy targets for thieves.
But do we ignore it when someone steals the $100 and instead blame the individual?
“She had it coming your honor” - what a great lesson for the kids.
Looks like the police have charged the kid, though the teacher is still fired (was asked to resign)
I’m no law talking guy, but it seems to me that the teacher has a better case now that the student is charged. Being charged or convicted means, to me at least, its more his fault. If the description of what he did was accurate (told anyone that he’d send them the pics, threatened the teacher that “her day of reckoning” was coming, someone [don’t know who yet] sent her printed photos to her mailbox) then he’s even more of a little shit that needs to be severely punished
I still consider the teacher to be the victim. If your most egregious act was forgetting to lock your phone, then you really have no culpability as far as being at fault here. That women are often punished for expressing their sexuality is a real thing, and this woman is being unfairly punished because her students now have proof she gets naked from time to time
Think of this another way. Let’s disregard who you may think is at fault here and who deserves what punishment. Let’s take the facts as we know them. Some students stole pictures from her phone. So why does she need to be fired? What’s wrong with a teacher teaching in a school in which some of her students have seen her naked? If she can muster up the courage to keep teaching, she should be allowed to. I don’t agree with this divide people want to put up between the students and teachers just because it was broached once by a student who broke the law. If a student or his parents have a problem with that, let them leave the school themselves
From the article you just linked to, it looks like her most egregious act was failing to properly supervise her students.
Possibly also misrepresenting, or outright lying about, what went on:
If the Superintendent’s account of the matter is fair and accurate, she may have been a bit of a problem employee. (And if it’s not, then he has it in for her.) At any rate, it seems pretty clear to me that there’s more to the story than just “teacher gets fired because student saw nude photos of her.”
No union in S. Carolina- it’s one of the five states where teachers’ unions and collective bargaining are illegal. Also, states in the south have pretty rigid codes of ethics for teachers.
I do have to say leaving a phone out where a kid could get at it is a rookie mistake. She was asking for it.
The more I think about it, the fishier this sounds. She just happened to have nude pictures of herself on her phone, AND she just happened to not have a password on it, AND she just happened to leave her phone unattended, AND she left her students unattended with her phone? That sounds to me like she wanted the students to see the pictures. And leaving the students unattended, even without the nude pictures, would itself be grounds for firing.
And if it’s true that she let students use her phone with her permission, then this sounds even more likely. Seriously, in the districts I teach in, we’re not even supposed to have our phones out at all, whenever students are present.
So what you’re saying is that you’d consider the person who left the information sitting on a device with no password to be hurting someone by failing to secure the information? In other words, that leaving a device with sensitive information on it unattended with no password is not protecting the information? If not, then you can’t blame the doctor or government office in this case.
She brought them to school and failed to secure them. That is providing them by any standard that I’m aware of - she brought them into the building (there would have been no pictures if not for her actions) and she left them available. If I bring a bunch of beer to school and leave it laying around unsecured, I would certainly expect to get in trouble for ‘providing’ alcohol to minors, even though I didn’t actually hand it to any of them.
Who in this thread advocating not punishing the kid? Certainly not the person you quoted in this reply. It’s possible for both people involved to do wrong.
“She brought nude pics of herself to school and left them unsecured, so she lost her job” is actually a great lesson in information security for the kids.
So, back to my earlier example, you’re saying that if your doctor pulls your medical record up on his phone, then leaves the phone sitting in the waiting room with no security, then someone takes your medical information, the doctor has no culpability at all?
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That women are often punished for expressing their sexuality is a real thing, and this woman is being unfairly punished because her students now have proof she gets naked from time to time
Women (and men) who express their sexuality to children that they’re in charge of deserve to get punished. This is not really a controversial position.
Geez, this is almost starting to sound like the plot to the movie* The Boy Next Door.* A terrible movie, by the way.
If the teacher was just being sort of clueless in leaving her phone unprotected, I don’t think she deserves to be fired. Maybe a reprimand and I bet she’ll learn never do that again.
But the student sounds so vindictive, I do find myself wondering if there isn’t more to the story.
To me, the more important part of the article was that she was on hall duty, so her absence was expected. If she had simply forgotten her phone, which many of us do, then the intrusion was by the student
I mentioned that the big difference in this case is that the info was hers alone, and the leak harmed no one except her. If I left someone else’s property out due to negligence and they were stolen, I should reimburse them somehow. If I left my own property out and it was stolen, I shouldn’t be punished. In both cases, the thief should have far worse punishment than I.
There’s probably a legal mandate that people, like doctors or teachers or lawyers, must keep the documents of their client or customer secure because its their responsibility. But less so for yourself.
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Nobody expressed their sexuality to anyone. The agent of the leak was the student, who took another person’s property, stole information from it, and disseminated it without permission. I think this case has more to do with punishing the teacher where in fact it should be about punishing theft.