Do you recognize this face? If so, you’re a perv. It is the face of 31 year-old California middle school teacher Stacie Halas. Seems innocent enough, right?

Not exactly.

Before becoming a school teacher, Halas performed as a pornographic actress, under the stage name Tiffany Six. Fearing that students would become aware of Halas’s past and become severely distracted, the Oxnard, California school board voted unanimously to fire her immediately. A record number of fathers attended the subsequent PTA meeting and demanded that she be reinstated. Halas had taught at the Richard B. Haydock Intermediate School for about 3 years prior to her firing.

She’s got 30 days to appeal the decision.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a tricky one.

Of course, you don’t want to put your children in the care of people of questionable behavior. The parents and school board may have been influenced by all of the media attention on sexual misconduct and statutory rape scandals often involving young female teachers and their male students.

However, there is no evidence of misconduct on Halas’s part as far as her actual job duties. We’re talking about something she had done in her past.

Let’s look at the facts again. This lady had been teaching at the school for nearly three years. She’s 31. That would mean that she’s been teaching at this particular school at least since she was 28. Not only that, but her porn days seemed to be done before she ever began teaching. She was probably in her early to mid-twenties when she appeared in the skin flicks. Those are ages when people are bound to make mistakes and questionable decisions (particularly those involving sex).

Do we want porn stars teaching our children? No, of course not. But how long will Ms. Halas have to pay for something she chose to do many years ago? It turns out that a few students found footage of her.

There is no easy answer to this one. Though I’m not a parent, I can imagine that if I had a choice between teachers who had never done porn and teachers who had, I would choose teachers who were squeaky clean. But how exactly do we define squeaky clean? What about a teacher with a DUI in his or her past? Aggravated assault? Domestic violence? The fact of the matter is that there are no perfect people, so depending on how we set the standards for teaching children, we may end up with an even smaller crop of teachers. That crop is already small enough.

At the same time, this should be a hard lesson learned to everyone. What you do today can come back to haunt you tomorrow, and rightfully so. That means we should be proactive, thinking critically about the decisions we make before we do things that may drastically alter our hopes and dreams.

Hint: If you plan on teaching children, porn is out of the question. All of the arguments above notwithstanding, is that really too much to ask?

Halas plans to fight the dismissal.

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