WARREN COUNTY, Indiana (WXIN) – Indiana school officials said a middle school teacher didn’t know the desk calendars she handed out as prizes were full of graphic and inappropriate material.
Bonnie Wright’s 13-year-old son brought one of the calendars home from Creston Middle School in Warren Township, Indiana on Friday. He used classroom points for good behavior to bid on the calendar as a prize.
“At first he didn’t give it to me, he just said ,’Mom, I think this has some bad words in it,'” Wright said.
When she checked it out, she found a lot more than bad words.
“(It talks about) drugs and sex and inappropriate things,” Wright said.
The calendar, called “Whoogle,” is a 2013 edition. It’s about things people Google and it looks innocent on the outside, with the tag line, “I wonder if dinosaurs eat peaches?”
Inside, though, many pages are too inappropriate to even repeat.
Some lines include “How do you know if birth control is working? Is it wrong to sleep with…” and pages full of pornographic lines and content.
“I just told him that a lot of that, it’s kind of sick thoughts, sick twisted things that nobody, not a normal person, an adult should think of,” Wright said.
Warren Township school officials told FOX59 the teacher handed out four of the calendars on Friday. She and the principal have called each of the parents involved to apologize.
“On Fridays, the students are allowed to purchase items with points that they earned. The calendars were sealed, the teacher had no idea what the contents of the calendars were … and feels horrible and embarrassed by this,” Assistant Superintendent Tim Hanson said.
The calendars came from Teachers’ Treasures on the east side, a store that gives away free school supplies to local teachers. A manager told FOX59 that the calendars were no longer on the shelves because they are 2013 editions. The owner did not return a call for comment about where other calendars may have been distributed.
Wright found a warning right on the back of the box, saying “some content may not be appropriate for young audiences.”
She said she wants other parents and teachers to know that the desk calendar isn’t what it looks like so that if more of them are out there, they will be found.
“I just want this to be taken seriously,” Wright said.
Teachers Treasures tells Fox 59 it is reviewing its policy for donations, after learning that a dirty calendar made its way into the hands of a young student.
“Teachers’ Treasures regrets having shared a donated calendar with content that was not appropriate to a classroom setting. We have pulled the remaining calendars and are reviewing our procedures for accepting donated school supplies,” Executive Director Margaret Sheehan said.
In a statement emailed to Fox 59, the owner of calendar distributor TF Publishing said his company did make donations to Teachers Treasures, but he did not believe this came from one of their donations.
“We make best efforts to not donate calendars with adult content warnings clearly printed on the box. But recognizing we are talking about a 2013 calendar that was donated over a year ago, this donation could have come from another source.
I am disappointed that it takes an incident like this to get Teacher’s Treasures and my company on the news. There are a lot of people that would like to know that my company has donated over a million calendars to Teacher’s Treasures / Kids in Need over the last 15 years and that this is a wonderful charity serving our community,” founder and CEO Jim Purcell said.
