BC teacher who met student on Grindr gets 8 year ban

A BC teacher who hooked up with a student he’d met on Grindr has been barred from teaching for eight years.

According to a Nov. 25 BC Commissioner for Teacher Regulation decision, Adam Richard Macdonald met the student on a Grindr dating app and entered into a sexual relationship with the student after they graduated.

The decision says the student was 17 years old, although they needed to be 18 to use the app, when the two first started messaging in 2016.

“Macdonald was unaware of the fact that (the) Student was a District student during this period,” the decision reads.

They took a break from messaging, but months later, when the student was now in Grade 12 the two began chatting on Grindr again.

Macdonald then realized that he’d once met the student on a school field trip. The two began messaging on Instagram and Macdonald gave the student his phone number.

In the summer of 2017, after the student had graduated from high school, they met in person and engaged in sexualized physical contact.

“At this time, (the) student was 18 years old. Over the course of the next year, (the) student  and Macdonald continued to periodically engage in physical contact, including kissing, cuddling and, on at least one occasion, oral sex,” the decision reads.

The decision says Macdonald told the student the school district couldn’t say anything about their relationship because they were at different schools.

The decision doesn’t say which school district Macdonald worked for or whereabouts in the province he taught.

It’s unclear how the relationship came to light, but in February 2024, Macdonald resigned.

At around the same time that Macdonald was beginning to message the student the school district issued the teacher a written warning and told him to “maintain appropriate professional boundaries with students.”

The letter told Macdonald to refrain from talking to students about his own personal sexual experiences and to take a boundaries course.

Macdonald signed a consent agreement admitting to his conduct, which barred him from applying to become a teacher for eight years.

“Macdonald engaged with a person he knew to be a current District student, on an adult website over several weeks,” the regulator says. “Macdonald engaged in inappropriate physical contact of a sexual nature with a person he knew had recently graduated from a District school.”

The regulator says that Macdonald’s behaviour was a serious breach of his position of trust as a teacher.