Lately, it seems like you can't swing a dildo dead cat in the blogosphere without hitting a story about a teacher getting fired over his/her porn past — it's starting to seem like getting railed on-camera is a prerequisite for a career in the public-education system. There's good news for these out-of-work educators, however: one of them, Shawn Loftis (a.k.a. former gay porn star Collin O'Neal) is once again working as a substitute math teacher at Nautilus Middle School, a year after the school fired him for having appeared in films like Mo' Bubble Butt and Humping Iron.
Loftis (above), who has also worked as a citizen journalist for CNN'S iReport, was suspended from the Miami-Dade County middle school after the principal discovered he had "his own personal gay website." Although Loftis appealed his suspension, administration officials claimed that he had violated the district's conduct policy, and his teaching certification was revoked by the Florida Department of Education. Last Friday, however, Loftis announced that the education commission had reversed his suspension, and he is now free to go back to work at the school.
Although it's unclear what prompted the education commission's change of heart, it probably had something to do with Loftis's appeal, in which he argued that he wanted to use his position as an educator to "guide students away from making the same mistakes he made," and that "what he did was not illegal." While I doubt that Loftis really thinks it's his responsibility to dissuade students from doing gay porn (I mean, getting ninth-graders to learn the quadratic equation is probably hard enough as it is), it's true that what he did was not illegal, nor is it in any way related to his skills as an educator. Hopefully, other school officials who have fired teachers for similar reasons will realize this as well.
