Teacher loses job over porn past...

Sometimes things fall into weird gray areas between black & white, even when it comes to morality.

As a kid, it’s hard to imagine your teachers having a life outside of school, a life where they do things that everyone else does as a grownup. People who aren’t friends with or related to teachers can carry that sheltered notion well into adulthood too. I know better. I was once married to a teacher. I’ve known many teachers and been drunk under the table by more than a few. Teachers are normal everyday human beings.

Certainly, we have a high expectation of the people who teach our children to be of decent moral fiber and above reproach, but after all, they are but fallible human beings. That said, I’m torn over the case of Stacie Halas, a middle school teacher from Oxnard, California.

Halas was fired in April of last year from her job as a science teacher at Haydock Intermediate School in Oxnard after pornographic videos of her were discovered online by students and teachers. On Tuesday, Halas lost her appeal to return to the classroom after a 3-judge panel ruled her unfit for the classroom.
"Although (Halas') pornography career has concluded, the ongoing availability of her pornographic materials on the Internet will continue to impede her from being an effective teacher and respected colleague," Judge Julie Cabos-Owen wrote in a 46-page decision issued Friday by the Commission on Professional Competence. Halas was continually deceitful about her nine-month career in the adult video industry before she went to work at the school, the decision said.

Halas has been on administrative leave since a video surfaced in March. Student claims that the teacher was moonlighting as a porn star were initially dismissed after school officials said that they couldn't find any images of her on the Internet, but they were using the school's computers, which don't allow access to adult content. Teachers then showed administrators downloads of Halas' sex videos from their smartphones.
Her lawyer, Richard Schwab, said Halas had tried to be honest but was embarrassed by her previous experience in adult videos. Schwab has said Halas did not star in pornographic movies while teaching in any district. He said that she took parts only during an eight-month period from 2005 to 2006 because of financial problems after her boyfriend abandoned her.

District superintendent Jeff Chancer applauded the commission's ruling. Halas' decision to "engage in pornography was incompatible with her responsibilities as a role model for students and would present an insurmountable, recurring disruption to our schools should she be allowed to remain as a teacher," Chancer said in a statement.
Now, here’s where I have some problems with things. Miss Halas was fired for doing something from BEFORE she became a teacher. This is contrary to what Chancer said in his release. Halas was not doing porn while working as a teacher. She was engaged in a legal activity, as California is the capital of the porn industry. She was not engaged in something illegal like prostitution on the street corners or in the drug trade. Illicit, yes; illegal, no.

Hell, we’ve made Kim Kardashian into a multi-millionaire for making a sex tape and treat her like royalty.

Halas is not a pedophile. She’s not a murderer. She’s not a thief.

She wasn’t screwing students or faculty members or parents, like some teachers I’ve seen in the news. She wasn’t knocked up by a student like teachers I’ve seen in the news. They’ve made feel-good TV movies on Lifetime about girls who were strippers in college to make ends meet who went on to be pillars of the community. Yeah, this is a bit more than stripping, but it’s along that same tangent.

Much fuss is being made over the fact that after extensive digging through the internet old footage of Halas was able to be found, but no one is making any noise about the kids who found it in the first place, or that when her fellow teachers caught wind of it, their first instinct was to use SCHOOL COMPUTERS to look for porn to find her and then had to resort to surfing with their phones to bypass the porn blocks.

It’s hard enough to find qualified people dedicated to the profession of education without turning them away for a legal activity they engaged in briefly before they went into teaching. Like I said, I’ve known plenty of teachers, and even firemen & cops, with pasts so checkered they’d look like a tablecloth at a picnic.

I say let her teach again, just in a different district.

Did you know that porn icon Ron Jeremy earned a bachelor's degree in education and theater and a master's degree in special education from Queens College in New York. He taught special-education classes in the New York City area and was a substitute teacher for regular classes before changing careers…