The 2011-12 teacher of the year in the Vineland School District has been fired for streaking naked through an apartment complex parking lot in Southern New Jersey.
Mark Bringhurst, a fifth-grade teacher for eight years at Winslow Elementary School, was arrested in March and charged with lewdness after police say he made his birthday-suit sprint, WNBC reports.
According to the Daily Journal, a local newspaper, police managed to find Bringhurst at an adult bookstore. He eventually admitted to being the streaker.
Bringhurst told police that someone he met online dared him to do the deed. He also reportedly said that his apartment-complex dash hadn’t been his foray into streaking; he claimed to have made the same run a year earlier.
The district’s pink slip proceedings — from initiation of charges to actual firing — took four months. A new law helped speed up the process.
The official reason for Bringhurst’s dismissal was conduct “unbecoming of a tenured teacher,” notes FOX Philadelphia FOX affiliate WTXF-TV.
An arbitrator handled the termination.
Bringhurst’s attorney had argued that the incident occurred off campus and that the school should weigh Bringhurst’s outstanding record as a teacher.