Some visual aids aren’t meant for the classroom. Last week, the investigative Web site The Smoking Gun obtained a copy of a May 18 search warrant application filed by the Newport News Police Department, seeking approval to search a white iPhone owned by Woodside High School teacher Melissa Kidd. According to the warrant application, Three…
Mariann Casados, a physical education teacher in the Mora Independent School District in Mora, New Mexico, was arrested on May 18, 2015 and charged with “a fourth-degree felony of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” According to the affidavit filed by the New Mexico State Police [see below], the girl’s mother had looked through…
In November 2011, the news broke that Claudia Tillery, a teacher at the Stephen Decatur Middle School (MS 35) in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, had been arrested and charged with a number of serious offenses, including rape of a student, unlawfully providing a student with drugs and alcohol, and sexual misconduct by a teacher.…
A new case arising out of White Oak, TX helps to illustrate not only the slippery slope of teacher-student cell phone communications, but the enormous challenges law enforcement officials face in investigating charges of digital misconduct. At the beginning of May, the news broke that an educator in the White Oaks Independent School District had…
Tuesday night (5/19), The Dr. Phil Show will air an interview by Dr. Phil McGraw of Jennifer Caswell, a 29-year-old former Oklahoma teacher who is charged “with three counts of second-degree rape, two counts of enticing a child, and one count of forcible sodomy.” Earlier today, I defended Louis C.K.’s unequivocal right under the First…
A 22-year-old young woman named Robyn Lynn Ruiz filed a federal lawsuit against the Rio Hondo Independent School District in Rio Hondo, Texas on March 19, 2015. [A copy of the Complaint can be viewed at the bottom of this post.] In her Complaint, Ruiz alleges that the school district failed to protect her from…
A 28-year-old former 5th grade teacher at the Graham & Parks School in Cambridge, Mass. was convicted last Wednesday of possessing child pornography, but was acquitted of a more serious production charge. Josh Wairi, who previously taught in the Somerville School District at the high school and the John F. Kennedy Elementary School, was arrested…
What did the staff and administrators in the Jefferson County Public Schools know, and when did they know it? That’s the essence of a lawsuit filed by the father of a 13-year-old boy who was assaulted by a 26-year-old middle school teacher named Jessica Boyer over a 3-month period, from February to April 2013. The…
Scott Schermerhorn, 31, a physical education teacher and boys’ golf coach at Clarksville High School in Indiana was arrested and suspended on April 16, when police accused him of soliciting nude photos from underage students at the school. In February, a 15 or 16-year-old girl (accounts differ) told a trusted adult friend that she had…
[Updated] A judge in the Auckland District Court will soon decide the fate of a New Zealand teacher accused of watching pornography on a school-issued computer and masturbating in an empty classroom. The report of the teacher’s alleged misbehavior came from a student who said that he had stopped by the classroom to discuss his…
