A B.C. teacher has been suspended from the profession for at least eight years after starting a relationship with a high school student over the Grindr dating app.
Adam Richard Macdonald was teaching at a different school than the student in January 2016 when the two met during a two-day field trip involving multiple schools.
The two interacted during the field trip but Macdonald didn’t know at the time that the student, 17 at the time, attended school in the same district. They stopped communicating for a few months, but connected on Grindr in June 2016 — when the student was still 17 but claimed to be 18 to access the adult-oriented app.
During the 2016-17 school year, when the student was in Grade 12, the two reconnected on Grindr, corresponding weekly.
The two soon realized they had met on the field trip and they continued to message each other, switching to Instagram then by text message after Macdonald gave the student his phone number.
In the summer of 2017, after the student graduated and had turned 18, they met at Macdonald’s home and “engaged in sexualized physical contact,” according to a consent resolution agreement
by the B.C. Commissioner for Teacher Regulation.
Over the next year, Macdonald and the former student continued to meet periodically and engage in physical contact, including “kissing, cuddling and, on at least one occasion, oral sex.” At one point, Macdonald told the student that the district could not say anything about the relationship because they were at different schools.
The relationship came after Macdonald had been issued a letter from the district, in June 2016, directing him to “establish and maintain appropriate professional boundaries with students and always be mindful of their individual rights and sensibilities,” not to talk to students about his sexual experiences and to take a course on boundaries.
Macdonald signed an undertaking not to teach in February 2024, then resigned from the school district in June of that year.
In the signed agreement, Macdonald admitted to professional misconduct and conduct unbecoming, and accepted an eight-year suspension of his teaching licence in the kindergarten to Grade 12 system, either public or independent.
The commissioner determined that an eight-year ban was needed because Macdonald “engaged with a person he knew to be a current district student, on an adult website, over several weeks”; because he “engaged in inappropriate physical contact of a sexual nature with a person he knew had recently graduated from a district school”; and because “his behaviour was a serious breach of his position of power and trust as a teacher.”
The school and district where Macdonald taught was not released to protect the student’s privacy.
