Maryland teacher’s aide Marc Schack, who works with disabled children and has a side business in which he dresses up as a pirate named “Captain Sillybones” and hosts children’s parties, was caught masturbating on a Zoom call as his special ed class watched.
After being caught masturbating on camera as children watched, Schack simply said “my bad” and was placed on administrative leave. The school’s administration claims the administrative leave is unrelated to his shocking performance in front of the children, however, and is simply because they misplaced his background check file.
Schack claims that he believed he was done participating in the class, and turned off the camera. Moments after believing he was disconnected from the students, he turned around and began masturbating vigorously. The video was recorded and eventually posted to social media.
“I thought I was logged out when class was over,” Schack told Bethesda magazine. “I had no clue that Zoom was still on. Why would I do that? That’s my job. I had no clue that Zoom was on. I mean, that’s just crazy behavior.”
“It was just a mistake on my part,” Schack said, adding that he thought he had turned off his connection to the virtual call. “I’m only human. It was my bad.”
He claims, “I’m not a pervert or anything like that, you know,” and noted he was told by administration that he was placed on administrative leave after masturbating before the conference call full of minors because they “misplaced his background check file.”
“You gotta believe me on that,” Schack insisted. “I thought I was in the privacy of my own home. I had no clue.”
According to the New York Post, Schack has worked for Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools for over 21 years, and “also runs Pirate Magic, a business that throws ‘pirate parties’ for youngsters while he portrays a character named “Captain Silly Bones”.
The school district did not acknowledge the sexually inappropriate contact Schack had with disabled minor students until Wednesday. The district also now claims that Schack’s administrative leave was not provoked by their loss of his background check file, but instead because he was caught masturbating as students watched:
In a message to community members on Tuesday, Shady Grove Principal Alana Murray wrote that, during an eighth-grade class, an employee was “seen on screen in a breakout room engaged in inappropriate behavior.”
MCPS spokeswoman Gboyinde Onijala told Bethesda Beat in a text message on Tuesday night — before Schack was interviewed and confirmed what happened — that the “behavior was sexual in nature.”
She said the employee was placed on paid administrative leave while the district investigates.
Maryland schools are still not open, and students and teachers are exclusively meeting remotely via Zoom.
This is not the first incident of men acting indecently while on a Zoom call. Last year, CNN analyst and New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin was fired after exposing himself and masturbating during a Zoom conference with his colleagues.
