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Russian Teacher Forced to Quit Over Sex Ed Blog

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A teacher in a prestigious St. Petersburg school has been forced to resign after the administration and the students’ parents found out about her adult sex education blog, media reported this week.

The Rimsky-Korsakov St. Petersburg State Conservatory’s special music school deemed it “inappropriate” for biology teacher Olga Shchegoleva to run the blog outside work hours, according to the Fontanka news website.

The school, which has taught gifted young musicians since 1936, stated that Shchegoleva had quit “of her own volition.”

But Shchegoleva maintained that she was wrongfully forced out and that the school administration had not raised these concerns when they were hiring her in September.

“I’m not pleased that such a scandal happened at school because of me,” the teacher told Fontanka on Monday.

“I only work with adults. Adult sex education allows you to raise healthy children and helps prevent violence,” she said of her blog, which she had written for a year and a half.

Shchegoleva says her Instagram page was marked “18+” and had age filters set up for subscribers.

“I’ve done everything by the law to protect children from information that might be traumatic, everything that the Instagram platform offers me,” Shchegoleva said.

Still, the teacher closed her account after submitting her resignation two weeks ago, according to Fontanka.

The latest scandal follows a series of dismissals of female teachers over revealing photos posted on their personal social media accounts in recent years. 

In 2019, fellow educators across Russia launched an online swimsuit flashmob in solidarity with one of their fired colleagues.

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