Teacher mistakenly hands out pornographic calendar full of ‘sick twisted things’ to students
An Indiana mother is outraged over what she calls an inappropriate prize that was given to her son. As reported by WXIN Fox 59, the prize was a desk calendar that contained graphic and inappropriate material, given out on Friday to four Creston Middle School students in Warren Township.
Bonnie Wright was made aware of the calendar when her 13-year-old son brought it home. He had used classroom ‘good behavior points’ to bid on the sealed calendar prize. The “Whoogle” 2013 calendar featured different things that people Google, like the subject included on the front of the box, “I wonder if dinosaurs eat peaches?” But reportedly, there were far more graphic topics included in the calendar.
Wright recounted, “At first [my son] didn’t give it to me, he just said, ‘Mom, I think this has like some bad words in it.’” The mom flipped through the calendar and was not happy with what she discovered. Wright says it was filled with references to, “Drugs and sex and inappropriate things to have sex with or people.” WXIN noted that they could not show whole pages on camera because they were, “pornographic and full of profanities.” Wright said, “I just told [my son] that a lot of that, it’s kind of sick thoughts, sick twisted things that nobody, not a normal person, an adult should think of.” After further investigation, Ms. Wright found a warning on the box the calendar came in that read, “Warning: Some content may not be appropriate for young audiences.”
Tim Hanson, Warren Township Assistant Superintendent, told the station, “On Fridays, the students are allowed to purchase items with points that they earned. The calendars were sealed, the teacher had no idea what the contents of the calendars were … and feels horrible and embarrassed by this.”
The unnamed teacher and the school principal called the parents of each student that received the offensive calendar to apologize.
The calendar prizes came from donations by Teachers’ Treasures, a non-profit in the area that gives away school supplies to teachers. Margaret Sheehan, the organization’s Executive Director told WXIN, “Teachers’ Treasures regrets having shared a donated calendar with content that was not appropriate to a classroom setting. We have pulled the remaining calendars and are reviewing our procedures for accepting donated school supplies.”
Jim Purcell, CEO of the calendar’s distributor, TF Publishing, emailed the station a statement reading, “We make best efforts to not donate calendars with adult content warnings clearly printed on the box. But recognizing we are talking about a 2013 calendar that was donated over a year ago, this donation could have come from another source. I am disappointed that it takes an incident like this to get Teacher’s Treasures and my company on the news. There are a lot of people that would like to know that my company has donated over a million calendars to Teacher’s Treasures / Kids in Need over the last 15 years and that this is a wonderful charity serving our community.”
Video and more info: WXIN
