Jose de Wit
SUN Staff Writer
The state Education Department has suspended for 15 months the teaching license of a now former Mesa Vista Middle and High School reading teacher who had been accused of viewing pornography in class while teaching at Dulce Middle School in 2007, according to court documents.
Johnny Garcia, 49, is no longer teaching at Mesa Vista, Principal Janette Archuleta said.
Garcia has since appealed the Department’s decision in state District Court, according to court records.
A hearing officer of the Department’s Ethics Bureau determined in late July that Garcia violated Dulce’s computer policy, but said there was no conclusive evidence that Garcia intentionally exposed students to pornography. The Department did not immediately fulfill a request for the full text of the decision.
According to a Department synopsis of the case, Dulce Middle School Principal Pamela Siders filed a complaint with the Department’s Educator Ethics Bureau June 19, 2007, which accused Garcia of viewing pornography on his classroom computer during class time.
The complaint was sparked by statements six students submitted March 27, 2007, to the school’s assistant principal after an incident the day before in which a whole class was allegedly exposed to pornographic images on Garcia’s computer.
According to student statements, Garcia sat at his computer while his class sat in a dark room watching a drug-prevention film. At one point, “when the (television) screen went dark it reflected nasty pictures of girls with out clothes.” Another sixth-grade student described an incident in which he walked to Garcia’s desk “to get a tissue to blow (his nose),” and saw on Garcia’s computer “a girl having porno sex and (Garcia) was sitting all relax and he was sitting smiling.”
Long before that incident, Garcia had already run into trouble with administrators.
According to a summary of Garcia’s disciplinary record submitted by Siders, Garcia kicked off the school year with a meeting in which Assistant Superintendent Tracie Phillips discussed with him “incidents which had happened with students the past year regarding how they felt in Mr. Garcia’s Language Arts class.”
By August 30, 2006, Garcia had been reassigned to teach health and fitness because he had failed to submit lesson plans for his Language Arts class and a month later, administrators admonished him for not properly supervising students during lunch, the summary states.
In January 2007, Siders sent Garcia a letter addressing complaints from three girls he had referred to Siders for “uncooperative behavior.” In the letter, Siders told Garcia the girls accused him of giving boys preferential treatment and said “they need to wear jackets over their tops because they had heard from others, including one of their mothers, that you look down girls’ blouses.”
A month later, “several comments from parents and students that Mr. Garcia spent an inordinate amount of time on the computer during class” led the District to audit Garcia’s computer usage. According to data submitted as evidence for Garcia’s hearing, the District’s technology department found Garcia’s Internet usage was 20 times higher than other teachers’.
According to a letter from Siders to Department Ethics Bureau Director Paul Calderon, the technology department also made a copy of Garcia’s hard drive that later revealed Garcia had made at least 1,323 Google searches in a 15-day span. If the District had printed out Garcia’s entire Internet usage history, the document would have been “over 900 pages in length,” Siders wrote. Also submitted as evidence in Garcia’s case are several dozen photos of semi-nude women the District later found saved on the “Favorites” folder of Garcia’s computer.
A day after the students filed their statements, the District placed Garcia on paid administrative leave and reported the incident to the Jicarilla Police Department, which in turn called the FBI, according to Siders’ summary.
Garcia resigned his Dulce teaching position in a May 11, 2007, letter. He was hired soon afterward to teach reading at Mesa Vista Middle and High School.
Mesa Vista Superintendent Robert Archuleta did not return several messages seeking comment.
Asked for more details, Mesa Vista School Board Secretary Janet Martinez refused to comment, saying “print what you want in your paper,” before hanging up on a SUN reporter.
The Ethics Bureau informed Garcia in January 2008 he was being investigated for “viewing sexually oriented pictures, including some semi-nude and nude adult males and females” on several occasions during class time, where students would have been able to view his computer monitor. The Bureau informed Garcia he risked losing his teaching license and set a hearing date in early April.
Garcia, who could not be reached for comment, said in April that the allegations against him were false, and that his innocence would be proven in a hearing.
In a second notice three months later, the Ethics Bureau acknowledged it so far only discovered “sexually oriented pictures, including some semi-nude females,” rather than the fully nude males and females it originally cited. The Ethics Bureau also delayed the hearing, at Garcia’s request, until June 4.
In the notice, the Ethics Bureau stated that “while the FBI had not completed its investigation after approximately nine months … since Mr. Garcia was still teaching (the Ethics Bureau) believed that the allegations were serious enough that it could no longer wait for the FBI to complete its investigation.”
FBI spokesman Darren Johns would not confirm whether the FBI seized Garcia’s computer, but said similar investigations typically take a year or more. Assistant United States Attorney Bill Pflugrath said it is “hard to say” what charges, if any, Garcia could face as a result of the FBI investigation. He said charges and penalties would depend on the strength of the evidence.
“Once the FBI does what they do, we’d have a better idea,” Pflugrath said. “Part of what they will do is determine the strength of the evidence.”