I could not pass this news up…..
No other problems have been reported on thousands of copies of Tessellations that have been sold, he said, adding that the company has “never had this happen before.”
Sounds like the Samizdat….
Ex-Valley firm tied to school tape containing porn
Peter Corbett
The Arizona Republic – Jun. 6, 2007 12:00 AMA former Scottsdale company produced an educational videotape that included hard-core pornographic images that were inadvertently shown to fourth-graders Monday in Virginia, according to school officials there.
About 20 students saw about 10 seconds of the pornography before a teacher sprinted across the room to turn off the television, said Ryan Edwards, a spokesman for the Bedford County schools, east of Roanoke.
“The children and the teacher were completely shocked,” Edwards said.
The offending clip appeared after the credits of a video called Tessellations that was produced in 2003 by Teachers Video Co., said Mark Flemming, communications director for School Specialty Inc., the Greenville, Wis., parent company of Teachers Video.
Teachers Video, formerly of Scottsdale, has since moved to Plainview, N.Y.
School Specialty is investigating whether the offending images could have come when Teachers Video was duplicating the videotape at a now-defunct production company in Scottsdale, Flemming said.
No other problems have been reported on thousands of copies of Tessellations that have been sold, he said, adding that the company has “never had this happen before.”
Tesselation is a mathematical term referring to mosaic patterns in numbers.
School Specialty is contacting schools nationwide to see whether offensive material might be on other copies of the videotape.
The Bedford schools had the tape for four years and no one had ever played the video past the credits, spokesman Edwards said.
“What we really feel happened is that in reproduction somebody decided to use a tape that was never erased,” he said.
School Specialty executives sent an e-mail to Bedford school officials apologizing for the error.
“I cannot tell you how sorry and how mortified we all are that your fourth-graders had such a horrifying experience with one of our titles,” said Adrienne Schure, a School Specialty vice president.
I like to call the tiles that I use to make my maps “Geographic Tessellations”
