In this tough economy, it’s hardly unusual for people to look for second jobs to make ends meet. Example: A teacher advertised online that she was looking for extra work because her bills were piling up. Unfortunately, her ad was on the “casual encounters” section of a popular Web site. And her school computer was involved.

Update: The Columbus Dispatch has now reported that teacher, Amber Carter has resigned from her teaching position and pled not guilty to a misdemeanor charge of prostitution. Prosecutors are still reviewing a charge of unauthorized use of a computer that the sheriff’s office filed against Carter. HR Blunders’ original post on this story continues below.

Now, fourth-grade teacher Amber Carter has been charged with prostitution. She’s admitted she posted an ad on Craigslist and used a school computer to send an undercover officer e-mails arranging a meeting, according to the Logan County sheriff’s office.

And until her case moves further along in the legal system, she is still collecting her teacher’s salary of $56,000, even though the Bellefontaine, OH, school district has placed her on administrative leave.

Detectives say it appears Carter used her school computer to meet men and women and charge them $50 or $100 for various sex acts.

The investigation started when the local sheriff’s office received an anonymous e-mail saying a local woman was advertising sex services online, according to The Columbus Dispatch.

An undercover officer posed as an interested customer and exchanged 24 e-mails with Carter.

In an e-mail sent on a Monday at 9:07 a.m., well after school had begun for the day, she offered sex and suggested a time.

The next day, Carter took a half-day of sick leave and left work early. She was arrested shortly after noon.

The Dispatch obtained a recording of Carter’s meeting with the undercover officer. She took $50 in exchange for sex. (Caution: The recording contains explicit content.)

Work computer seized

Besides the prostitution charge, which is a misdemeanor, Carter faces a fifth-degree felony count of unauthorized use of property. Detectives have seized her school computer.

She has a spotless 13-year record with Bellefontaine schools. The district superintendent is quoted as saying he’d like to fire her now “but constitutional rights and due process come into play so the lawyers are proceeding properly.”

School district lawyers have suggested to Carter that she resign, but she hasn’t.

Was this an isolated incident for Carter? Sgt. Ryan Furlong doesn’t think so. He suspects Carter has been doing this for a while because “she was calm, cool and collected in that hotel parking lot. Not nervous at all. This wasn’t her first time.”

Certainly, this is an extreme case of an employee in financial trouble looking for an extra source of employment. Does your company have a policy about second jobs? What would happen if one of your employees used a company computer for a side business — even one that’s not illegal? Let us know in the Comments Box below.

Victoria, Australia’s top teaching watchdog says a teacher accused of swearing at 11-year-old students can keep his teaching license. The Victoria Institute of Teaching (VIT) did find the unidentified teacher guilty of incompetence for failing to adequately supervise students, maintain a safe environment or adequately protect students from harm.

The teacher left the school where he had problems but found a teaching job elsewhere, according to the newspaper, The Australian.

Among the accusations against the teacher, he allegedly:

• permitted a Year 5 student to climb over a tennis court fence
• failed to take action after a fight between two pupils
• allowed students to wander off, and
• dropped the f-bomb twice in front of students.

Here’s the best part: He also allowed students to wrestle in the classroom. His defense: He said he was showing his pupils the difference between real wrestling at the Commonwealth Games and fake TV wresting. (TV wrestling is fake?)

The VIT panel found the teacher’s wrestling explanation was plausible!

The panel wrote in its judgment, “The conduct was related to a relatively short period of time in a career that spanned nearly seven years.”

The school drew pupils from a disadvantaged community. Many of the students had various behavioral problems.

Pupils cleaned the room, organized books or took out the trash.

But parents weren’t happy about one of the usual jobs on the list: Give the teacher a back massage.

Now Coulter is out of a job.

Parents complained when their children told them that giving Coulter a back rub was one of the duties on the classroom job list.

School administrators told WFTV-TV that Coulter no longer works for the district and that a new teacher has already been hired. Because the situation is considered a personnel matter, they won’t confirm the firing was due to the back massages.

So you’d think Thomas Doss, Jr. would have thought twice about falling asleep in his car while it was parked in his employer’s lot in the wee hours of the morning — especially when he had marijuana in the car.

Sheriffs’ deputies in Loudoun County, VA, found Doss sleeping in a parked car in the lot of Rolling Ridge Elementary School at 1:30 a.m. Doss is a teacher at two other schools in the same district.

The deputies noticed marijuana in the car and charged Doss with misdemeanor possession.

The local school system has placed Doss on administrative leave.

It’s one thing when you catch a worker watching porn. It’s entirely something else when others are exposed to the pornographic materials.

A Phoenix high school photography teacher is under investigation by police for allegedly projecting pornography on a screen in a classroom occupied by 13 students.

A student told a local TV station in Phoenix that the teacher had connected his personal computer to a projector screen for a photography lesson.

According to the student, the teacher was watching porn at his desk but must have forgotten he had the computer tied in to the screen.

Students say they saw six pornographic scenes.

Some of the teens also wondered if the teacher could have been watching porn at other times during the school year. “I was just creeped out that a teacher that I had known from the beginning of the year could have been watching this the whole time we were in class,” one student told ABC-15 in Phoenix.

Arcadia High School sent a letter home to parents that stated the teacher was placed immediately on administrative leave and that the district was investigating.

Police will determine, based on the district’s report, whether any charges should be filed against the teacher.

Chicago Public Schools are considering whether to suspend or fire a teacher. The parents of a 13-year-old Muslim boy say the teacher called the boy a terrorist.

The Chicago Tribune reports the teacher allegedly turned to the boy during a history class and used him as an example of “terrorists blowing up something on a plane.”

School officials have investigated the complaint against the unnamed teacher, and she now faces discipline. The district hasn’t yet decided what the discipline will be.

That’s what happened in North Carolina at the Davidson County Schools when HR there ran a routine background check on a new teacher.

Arlene Hudson is wanted in Maryland in connection with a 2005 theft of a motor vehicle from a car dealership.

One recent afternoon, school officials called Hudson to the district’s administrative offices where she was detained by HR. She was arrested as a fugitive from justice.

Maryland authorities plan to extradite her back to that state, according to The News-Record.

Hudson had been offered a teaching contract contingent on completing the employment process which included a background check. 

Good thing the school followed through on the background check.

A teacher, identified only as Antonino R., was reprimanded for spitting in the direction of the female school principal three times during a meeting at a Palermo, Italy, training institute.

The teacher said his spitting represented his opinion about the oppressive behavior of the principal. He also claimed his spit couldn’t have reached the principal because his mouth was dry from the heated argument that led to the incident.

The judges who heard the teacher’s appeal of the reprimand said whether the spit could reach the principal was irrelevant.

The court said spitting isn’t a legitimate means of critical expression.

Faruq Hossain, a teacher at the Satkhira government school in southwestern Bangladesh, has been fired after he chopped off chunks of 14 students’ hair to punish them for misbehaving, according to wire service reports.

The school has apologized to the students’ parents. 

The teacher cut students’ hair because he couldn’t get the 14- and 15-year-olds to behave, according to the school’s headmaster (maybe the teacher thought HE was the headmaster).

One tactic: Tell them the consequences will be very distasteful to them if they don’t calm down and pay attention to the lesson.

Well, that’s more or less what a teacher in Britain’s Sudbury Upper School and Arts College in Suffolk recently threatened, and then carried out.

The rotund substitute threatened to punish his misbehaving 13- and 14-year-olds by making them look at his body.

When the students didn’t quiet down and pay attention, he carried out his threat.

The teacher took off his shirt — and he didn’t have an undershirt on. But that was it. No other clothes were shed.

When you have a classroom full of teenagers, chances are one of them is going to have a camera phone — maybe even one capable of recording video.

You guessed it — a student caught the striptease on his camera phone. It didn’t take long for the performance to be distributed to other students’ camera phones, according to the Daily Mail. From there, of course, it went on YouTube.

And after that, the school’s headteacher got a look at it.

Now, the substitute has been barred from working at any Suffolk schools.

The school refused to give the teacher’s name, saying, “Disciplinary matters are private between the school [and] the man concerned.”

Only in the Internet age can you have a video of yourself doing a striptease distributed so anyone in the world can see it — without your name being attached for proper credit.