Teacher Resigns After Porn Past Comes Out

A teacher has left her job after a student recognized her from some nineties porn movies. And this is the second time she’s had to quit teaching over completely legal films she made years ago.

In a case reminiscent of former sex worker Melissa Petro’s ouster from her Bronx school, Tera Myers was apparently confronted by one of her students at St. Louis’s Parkway North High School about her past in porn movies (the Riverfront Times helpfully lists some of the films: Anal Cravings 13, In Thru the Out Door 7, Major Sluts, Butt Brats 7 and Double Your Pleasure Double Your Fun, all apparently from the mid-nineties). According to the NY Daily News, she then decided to leave her teaching post “out of respect for her privacy and that of her family.” A district spokesman added, “She was concerned about the impact it would have in the building.” She’ll draw a salary through the end of the year, but won’t be back to teach next fall.

Myers’s porn past had also gotten her fired from her job at a Kentucky school back in 2006 — in both cases, the Daily News said her porn career didn’t show up in a background check because it wasn’t illegal. There’s also no reason it should have affected her teaching ability. It’s not like she was showing porn to her students — and in fact, she never would’ve been outed at her St. Louis job if the teenage whistleblower hadn’t been looking at porn in the first place. Memo to Parkway North and high schools nationwide: your students can learn way more about porn from thirty seconds on the Internet than they can from a teacher who was in Major Sluts fifteen years ago and by all accounts never talks about it in the classroom. And the American education system has way bigger problems than whether some lady used to have sex on camera. Even if it was entirely Myers’s own decision to leave Parkway, she likely came to it in light of the stigma she faced in Kentucky. At that time, she said, “Anybody who has been in my classroom could tell you how much I love teaching and how much I love these students, and that should be what matters more than anything in my past.” If only everyone she worked with were so reasonable.

Tera Myers, Ex-Porn Star, Loses Teaching Gig In St. Louis, After Student Discovers Her X-Rated Past [NY Daily News]
The Film Titles Of Parkway North Teacher And Former Porn Star, Tera Myers [Riverfront Times]