Almost everyone can recall “that one teacher” from their school days who was involved in some sort of scandal that everyone gossiped about. Recently, I asked the BuzzFeed Community to share their teacher drama stories that people still talk about years later. Here are the shocking, infuriating, and wild scandals they unfortunately witnessed.
Note: This post contains mentions of child abuse.
1.“Although it was in America, our high school had a British system with a headmaster and principal. The principal was married to the headmaster’s daughter. The principal also coached the girls’ volleyball team. Once one of the volleyball players graduated, she leaked that they had been sleeping together. The principal lost his job and his wife that week.”
2.“In middle school, we had a math teacher who had a bit of an anger problem. Everyone knew him as kind of an asshole. He would regularly humiliate students in class and refuse to give bathroom passes. A lot of girls were going through puberty at that time, and sometimes, if you asked him for a hall pass mid-class, he’d ask if it was for ‘female stuff.’ Even if you answered that it was, he still said no.”
“Anyway, one day, we got let out of school early with no warning, and it was all very confusing. While we were waiting for our rides home, it slowly spread around that the math teacher got into a verbal fight with a student mid-class because this kid said, ‘Screw you, I have to go to the bathroom,’ and stood up to leave.
The part of the story kids from that class agreed on was that during the fight, the teacher clutched his chest and DROPPED DEAD. Some kids who were in that class said he physically put his hands on the student as if to shove him back into his seat, and some kids claimed he actually DID shove or even THROW the kid.
Either way, the teacher definitely died of a heart attack in front of a class full of students who hated him. The school later did a grief assembly and made us plant a memorial tree/bench in his honor, but we were all kind of confused about it because everyone absolutely hated him. The tree got vandalized a lot. I don’t think it lasted a year.”
—Laura, Michigan
3.“Two English teachers were having an affair, and the guy decided it would be funny to send an explicit picture of himself to his affair partner’s classroom printer after school hours. She didn’t hear the printer and didn’t pick it up, and a student found it the next day. They both got fired.”
4.“My kindergarten teacher was always a bit sketchy, missed a lot of days, and even skipped classes sometimes. Things came to a head when he picked up a kid he didn’t like and put him in the large fish tank. He also flushed that kid’s coat down the toilet. The teacher was fired, but not until later in the year. The kid moved away after that, and I hope he’s okay.”
—Neil, 36
5.“In my bachelor’s degree general education classes, I had to take a foreign government class. At the end of the semester, our professor was explaining the final when the department head came in. The professor stepped out of the room to speak to the head and returned almost a second later. She packed everything up, said a quick, tearful goodbye, and left. The department head walked in and explained that we would have no final and would pass with our current grade. Only after we started pestering them with questions did we find out that THE UNIVERSITY FAILED TO RENEW HER GREEN CARD PROPERLY, AND SHE WAS DEPORTED!”
6.“We had this vice principal who was just the worst. Short, bald, Napoleon-complex type of guy. Anyway, the senior class at the time found out he was texting inappropriate, gross sex stuff to a former student. When some of the guys got ahold of the text messages, they printed out about 1,000 copies and threw them all over the school Mean Girls style. He was married, and I remember feeling really bad for his wife. The VP ended up getting fired and divorced. Nothing happened to the students who did it, either. It was just wild to be a part of.”
7.“The school principal bought a motorcycle without his wife’s knowledge or permission. He struck a deal with the head custodian that if he’d store it in a school outbuilding with the lawnmowing equipment, then the custodian could ride it from time to time, as long as he kept quiet about it. Well, the custodian got in a near-fatal accident on said motorcycle. The custodian sued the principal and school district, the wife left him, and he got fired for improper use of school facilities.”
8.“Last year, the sixth graders had a new science teacher. He quickly became one of the ‘favorites.’ He was really funny, handsome-looking, in his late 20s/early 30s, and supposedly very rich. He wore suits around campus, and it was rumored that he only taught for fun because he had enough money to go without a job. The clubs he hosted during lunch were jam-packed with students (particularly sixth-grade girls), and they would call themselves ‘Mrs. [teacher’s name]’ and talk about his money.”
“We thought it was all a little cringe but didn’t think much of it. Then, halfway through the year, he was gone. The sixth graders were devastated, and the girls even started crying.
At first, people thought he quit, but eventually, everyone found out he was fired. We thought it was because he was teaching the wrong curriculum and forgot about it. But recently, word got out from one of the teachers that it was because he was giving the girls his phone numbers and texting them.
That’s right; a 30-something-year-old man was texting 11-YEAR-OLD girls who were convinced they’d marry him. This year, the sixth-grade science teacher is a woman.”
—Anonymous
9.“In seventh grade, my Spanish teacher was fired after it was found out she’d been keeping her son under her desk for months. We had no clue — there was a table skirt all around the desk.”
10.“One year at the school talent show, one of the male teachers (who was in his mid-30s) got up on stage with one of the year 11 girls and performed a dance based on the video ‘Especially For You’ by Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan. It was all deeply strange and quite uncomfortable to watch, especially the part of the performance when they ran towards each other and embraced in the middle of the stage.”
“A few months later, after the girl left the school, the teacher left his wife and child (a toddler) and moved in with the girl.
This was the ’90s, but I’m sure if it happened today, the teacher would have been suspended from his job and faced a police inquiry. However, he carried on teaching at the school as if nothing had happened, though rumor and innuendo followed him constantly.
One rumor that seemed to be true was that, about six months later, the teacher had left the girl and moved in with another woman — her mother.”
11.“A math teacher was also the head of the theater department at my high school. He was married and had a few kids. It became fairly obvious that he had a ‘favorite’ student; she was regularly a featured dancer even though she was not that talented. After she graduated, he divorced his wife and went public with his new relationship — the favorite dancer! She then went to a local college to become a teacher, and he got her a job at the same high school, and she had to teach his kids from the first marriage! He even put her in charge of the dancers for the theater department. It was very awkward. He once lied about how they met during an interview, even though the entire school knew the real story. I felt bad for his kids.”
—Anonymous, 40, Pennsylvania
Lightfieldstudios / Getty Images/iStockphoto
12.“The history teacher hit a girl in the stomach, and she peed her pants in front of everyone. The teacher said she ran into him. It was investigated, and he didn’t take any accountability. The parents are now going to rightfully sue. I had that history teacher in the seventh or eighth grade. He was awful to everyone. I also played soccer with his son as a kid. His kid is just as bad.”
13.“I was at an all-girls school with a ‘brother’ school. In our second year, an art teacher randomly stopped coming in, and we had to get a sub. This teacher was a woman in her late 50s, so pregnancy wasn’t really an option. She also had a son in his sixth year at the ‘brother school,’ so, at least on the girls’ side, the assumption was she was looking after her son after an accident. It later came out that, actually, she had started an affair with her son’s BEST FRIEND! They got caught while ‘engaging in explicit acts’ in the art department, and she was fired. There was no real conclusion, just rumors that her son has cut ties and that she isn’t allowed to be a teacher elsewhere.”
14.“One of the school security guards was quietly let go amid rumors that he had been sending a senior girl inappropriate texts. The next day, somebody found his YouTube channel, where he had posted himself singing an original song called ‘Bang You Like a Turtle, Girl.’ The song included him making copious turtle sex noises and ended with, ‘Look up turtles bangin’, yo.’ He was a cashier at the local Trader Joe’s for a few years after that.”
—Anonymous, 28, Illinois
15.“In eighth grade, one of our sex-ed/PE teachers was fired for falsifying her qualifications. A year after that, ANOTHER PE teacher was fired for falsifying qualifications. Two of the three remaining PE teachers engaged in an affair, which the entire student body knew and gossiped about constantly. They eventually divorced their partners and got married.”
16.“I went to a high school that primarily hired international teachers, and one physics teacher went off the rails one year. He would act very erratically, but we chalked it up to him being quirky. About halfway through the school year, after winter break, he was gone. Students and faculty were confused; he had just disappeared and got replaced. We had conspiracies ranging from fake identity to maybe he just found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. One year later, they were able to track him because he had taken a school computer with him to the Bahamas and had never come back.”
—Anonymous, 23, Indiana
If you have a teacher scandal from your school days, feel free to share it in the comments or fill out this form to remain anonymous.
If you are concerned that a child is experiencing or may be in danger of abuse, you can call or text the National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453(4.A.CHILD); service can be provided in over 140 languages.
Source Agencies
