Unless there is something more to this story, the teacher and the community should be angered that the puritanical tendencies of one parent could blemish what sounds like a distinguished teaching career.

...Ms. McGee, 51, a popular art teacher with 28 years in the classroom, is out of a job after leading her fifth-grade classes last April through the Dallas Museum of Art. One of her students saw nude art in the museum, and after the child’s parent complained, the teacher was suspended.

Although the tour had been approved by the principal, and the 89 students were accompanied by 4 other teachers, at least 12 parents and a museum docent, Ms. McGee said, she was called to the principal the next day and “bashed.”

She later received a memorandum in which the principal, Nancy Lawson, wrote: “During a study trip that you planned for fifth graders, students were exposed to nude statues and other nude art representations.” It cited additional complaints, which Ms. McGee has challenged.

The school board suspended her with pay on Sept. 22.

In a newsletter e-mailed to parents this week, the principal and Rick Reedy, superintendent of the Frisco Independent School District, said that Ms. McGee had been denied transfer to another school in the district, that her annual contract would not be renewed and that a replacement had been interviewed.

The episode has dumbfounded and exasperated many in and out of this mushrooming exurb, where nearly two dozen new schools have been built in the last decade and computers outnumber students three to one.

A representative of the Texas State Teachers Association, which has sprung to Ms. McGee’s defense, calls it “the first ‘nudity-in-a-museum case’ we have seen.”

“Teachers get in trouble for a variety of reasons,” said the association’s general counsel, Kevin Lungwitz, “but I’ve never heard of a teacher getting in trouble for taking her kiddoes on an approved trip to an art museum.”

There is a difference between art and pornography; not every representation of a nude body is a case of the latter. There is a reasonable expectation that any decent museum will have its share of nude paintings and sculpture that the majority of us would agree fall into the “art” category; any parent who objects to any nude representations shouldn’t let the school take their kids to an art museum. This isn’t a reflection on the teacher or the art, in fact, it’s a reflection on the minds and beliefs of the parents and a school administration taking this single complaint to an extreme conclusion.

I’ve only seen this story and I’ve only read, essentially, the one side of the story. There may well have been other reasons and other complaints for the administrator’s actions. On the face of it, though, this is just wrong.

Read the story.