Last month, I was invited to participate in a podcast called “A Sickness of Silence,” part of an ongoing series of roundtable discussions involving survivors of child abuse and various experts on the topic. One of the participants in the roundtable, Michael Skinner, has been kind enough to read my blog and recently sent me…
How much privacy should your child have? That’s a question that parents and children have been debating for quite some time, but with increasing intensity over the last few decades. As you might expect, parents vary widely in the amount of privacy they allow their children. (And the protestations of my younger son–at age 4(!)–notwithstanding,…
Nearly 900 years ago, in 1154, an English bishop named Nicholas Breakspeare was elected Pope, and took the name Adrian IV. He is thus far the only Englishman to serve as the Holy Pontiff. Pope Adrian IV only served for five years before his death in 1159, and left at most a modest footprint on…
In May 2014, a substitute teacher at Highland Park High School in Highland Park, IL (a suburb just north of Chicago) raised concerns that two of his students had been cheating. Following an internal investigation, the high school not only sided with the students but told Steven Habay, then 40, that he was being released…
Over the last couple of years, I’ve dived deeply into the topic of teacher misconduct. The cases I’ve studied and summarized have ranged widely, from the merely sad to the reprehensible to the truly horrifying. One thing is abundantly clear: we need to improve teacher candidate education and professional development to better instruct educators about…
The annual conference of the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) is being held in Washington, DC this week, and as usual, it is has been an energizing and thought-provoking experience. FOSI Founder and CEO Steven Balkam and his staff do a terrific job of putting together a compelling slate of presentations on some of the…
Over the past six months, the Utah Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force conducted an investigation into the online activities of Jeffrey Thomas Patterson, a seventh-grade science teacher at the West Hills Middle School in West Jordan, Utah (a suburb of Salt Lake City). On Wednesday, November 4, law enforcement officials executed a search warrant…
2015-11-11 Cybertraps for Educators [webinar] from Frederick Lane An online presentation for the Independent Schools Association of the Central States on November 11, 2015. If you are interested in discussing a presentation or professional development program for your organization on this topic, please contact me for information regarding my rates and availability.
On Wednesday, October 28, a freshman at Mulberry High School in Mulberry, FL approached her teacher’s desk to ask a question about classwork that had been assigned. As she neared Vadi Velez-Gonzalez’s desk, she could see his iPhone lying face-up on his desk, and was shocked to see it displaying images of adult gay pornography.…
State College, PA has had its share of unpleasant headlines recently (see, e.g. “Sandusky, Jerry“). Now come reports that Wesley Amy, a State College Area High School computer science teacher, has been convicted by a jury of offering students good grades in exchange for nude photos. The 28-year-old educator began teaching computer science at the…
