College teacher used school laptop to visit porn sites

A teacher at Hawke’s Bay’s Flaxmere College has been censured for viewing pornography on his school laptop.

The man, whose name was suppressed, visited at least 20 named pornographic and dating sites between 2015 and 2017.

He was dismissed in May 2017 after the school principal found out about it and referred the case to the Teaching Council.

A Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal decision has only just been issued after dealing with the teacher’s late application for name suppression, based on the potential effects in his teenage son and daughter if his name was published.

An agreed statement of facts states that “forensic examination of the school laptop revealed that the respondent had used the laptop to undertake extensive web surfing, including pornographic websites, adult pornographic dating websites and web chat sites“.

“The search terms used include ‘sexting site’, ‘compilation porn’ and ‘doggystyle compilation porn,”’ it said. “Mom” and “granny” were among the search fields.

“One of the pornographic videos located was titled ‘Big Tits at School Compilation’, which had been accessed by the respondent on

March 27, 2017 at 4.23am.”

When the principal recovered the laptop, a forensic examination found the teacher had “attempted to erase any trace of the material”.

“He removed the material from the laptop’s recycle bins and ran the following programs or systems utilities: Defrag; Disc Clean-up; and Clean manage.”

“The respondent admitted to using pornography on the school-issued laptop and stated he ‘accepts with hindsight that it would have been better if he had not viewed pornography on the school laptop’,” the agreed statement said.

“The respondent, however, denied that he did so from the school location at any time.

“The respondent does admit to attempting to conceal his accessing of pornography from investigation by ‘cleaning’ his viewing record off the school laptop. He admitted to the Education Council that this was driven by his embarrassment as a result of his actions.”

The tribunal accepted that there was no evidence that the teacher viewed porn at school, so the chances of any students seeing the material was “remote“.

The tribunal censured the teacher and ordered that, for the next two years, he must provide a copy of the decision to any school that employs him.