The Illinois chapter of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) recently held its 41st Annual Pre-K and Kindergarten Conference. One of the scheduled speakers and presenters for the virtual conference was a teacher who has posted explicit videos and photos of himself on an adult website and has gained a large following on TikTok for posting videos about being a "gay" preschool teacher.
Tell Williams IV, described in reports as a "gay porn star," is an openly homosexual pre-K teacher at a private school near Philadelphia. He was disinvited from participating in the conference once his lurid and profane videos were revealed to the state ASCD chapter.
AFN spoke with Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute who, despite the fact Williams was pulled from the speakers' list, argues the educators' group had no business even entertaining the notion.
"The fact that he would have ever been invited in the first place is so outrageous and so beyond the pale," says Higgins. "I mean, perhaps some leader at the conference said Well, we didn't know about it. But that's inexcusably irresponsible."
Allowing an avowed self-promoter of pornography to be a teacher, says Higgins, demonstrates how emotionally sluggish conservatives have become.
"And the idea that schools would allow him, no matter what he's doing during school time, that they would let a person who would do something like that be in the presence of children shows you how desensitized we are," she laments.
According to the Illinois ASCD website, Williams was going to discuss "what real and effective self-care items look like, how we can better advocate for ourselves and our colleagues both in and out of the classroom, and ways we can help normalize and humanize teachers."
