Court rules that browsing porn thumbnails is grounds for dismissal of teacher

[thewayne]

As it happens, the teacher in question was also the head of a union, so his relationship with the district was not great.

"Here’s how the court described Zellner’s computer-use violation of November 2005:

First, Zellner disengaged the “safe search” filter. He then typed “blonde” into the Google search box. The search produced 20 “thumbnail” images, all of them pornographic, with links to more images within and outside the Google website. He then clicked to display the next 20 images. Zellner then clicked a link entitled “more of these” adjacent to images from www.ardentes.free.frblonde.com. When Zellner did so, another 20 pornographic “thumbnail” images were displayed on his monitor for a total of 17 seconds. Zellner did not click on any of the photographs displayed in his search. The entire incident took 67 seconds.

The appeals court said that 67 seconds was all that was necessary to be fired. It was unrelated to him being a vocal opponent of the district and making comments in the local press, the court said."

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/view-porn-be-fired/

Comments

[silveradept]

The court went out if its way to say "Pay no attention to the contentious union-employer relationship here", which makes me think that such relationship was the real reason for the firing, and that they were looking for an excuse. I wonder what the teacher was actually searching for and why that he was looking for that. Perhaps some A+P work or something?

[vdansk]

Unless he had really bad eyesight...he knew with that first screen that he wasn't finding something safe for work. If this was a school computer, then I actually agree that it violates the zero tolerance policies that most schools have. And HAVE to have, both to protect kids and not to get sued when kids end up harmed anyway.

Removing the safe filter before looking for the word blond...unless the safe filter blocks all images, why would he do that if not looking for something at least on the edge?

My attitude may be different because A) I have two daughters in school systems, and B) a teacher at our highschool was recently caught having an affair with his 15 year old student. I'd met the guy; he was nice, charming, articulate, stood up for things...and was a sexual predator anyway.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's the thing. He intentionally turned off the safe filtering, then continued browsing when the search obviously turned up porn.

His decisions, his bad, his job. He's lucky the thumbnails were regular porn and weren't kiddieporn, or it could also be his prison sentence.