NJ Court Upholds Decision to Dismiss Porn-Surfing School Librarian

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Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 3/5/2008 2:00:00 PM

A New Jersey middle school librarian fired for surfing sexually explicit Web sites on a school computer has lost her state appeal. The New Jersey Superior Court's Appellate Division on March 3 upheld the state Board of Education's 2006 decision to dismiss Darlene Donahue and strip her of her tenure.

Donahue, a 14-year veteran of the Pemberton Township School District, was working at Newcomb Middle School in October 2002 when school officials suspended her for accessing pornographic Web sites and writing questionable emails over the course of three days that month. 

An administrative law judge, the acting commissioner of education, and the state board issued concurring opinions finding that Donahue should be dismissed after displaying "conduct unbecoming a public school teacher." Testimony from school computer officials described 52 inappropriate sites accessed by Donahue, plus emails such as the following, to an unidentified recipient: "I hope you like the card I sent you. Little nasty, so you might want to turn the screen and turn down volume if you have sound on your comp."

While Donahue has never denied accessing the sites, she has repeatedly argued that her purpose was not prurient but rather to demonstrate—just days before she was scheduled to start teaching students about the Internet—the fallibility of the school's Internet filter technology. "The case just doesn't make sense," says the librarian's attorney, Steven Cohen, adding that he’s uncertain about a state supreme court appeal. "You have to ask yourself, 'Why did she go to these sites for three days and only three days over her entire career?' There had been a series of incidents the year before, which weren't disputed, where her kids had gotten access to porn sites, not only at school but in the presence of her principal."

Cohen says the school has since replaced school computers with more restrictive filters.

But long before that happened, Cohen says, Donahue approached her principal to say, "I'm concerned. I don't think the filter system is working—there are all these pop-ups."

According to a preliminary document from the appellate division, there is a dispute over that statement. In addition, there are questions over whether Donahue's access to inappropriate sites was limited to October 9, 10, and 11, 2002, the three days cited in court documents to which Cohen refers. A network engineer testified at one point that computer logs regularly write over previous data going back more than seven days.

Cohen makes another point in Donahue's defense, however: She looked at such a broad range of explicit sites, he says, echoing testimony from her expert computer witness, that "research," not "prurience" seems to have been her goal.