A teacher in Virginia accidentally exposed a room full of fourth-graders to explicit pornographic images that appeared on an educational videotape:
About 20 students saw about 10 seconds of the pornography before a teacher sprinted across the room to turn off the television, said Ryan Edwards, a spokesman for the Bedford County schools, east of Roanoke. “The children and the teacher were completely shocked,” Edwards said.
The offending clip appeared after the credits of a video called Tessellations that was produced in 2003 by Teachers Video Co., said Mark Flemming, communications director for School Specialty Inc., the Greenville, Wis., parent company of Teachers Video. (…) The Bedford schools had the tape for four years and no one had ever played the video past the credits.”
Link. Lucky for the teacher involved, authorities in this case aren’t behaving as stupidly as those in the unfortunate case of Julie Amero. Previous BoingBoing posts about that story here. (Thanks, Grayson)
Reader comment: Michael Kopp says,
I work for an educational publisher and we had this happen with one of our video titles a few years back. Fortunately we caught it before it shipped. Based on what the (very apologetic) firm responsible told us, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. They explained that a lot of their revenue, and the revenue for many video duplication outfits, comes from the porn industry. (They may have been something of a bottom feeder, though, as I doubt this is true industry-wide.) Duplicators reuse tapes to save money, and though they are supposed to erase these tapes instead of just recording over them, that obviously doesn’t always happen. Needless to say, we found another company to dupe our videos.
The switch to DVDs might have taken care of this. A lot of schools still use VHS, though, and given their lack of funding may continue to do so for a long time. So if you’re a teacher using VHS, or anyone with cheap VHS tapes, you might fast forward past the credits and see what you can find.