Finding archived stories about my high school in Easley, South Carolina, was a bit difficult. There’s plenty of news from recent years, but once I searched for news from 2009 or prior, the selection was scarce. I did find this story about an Easley High School teacher who was charged with four counts of soliciting minors. Yes, it’s a very gloomy story. But it interested me because I had no clue. I was about to enter middle school at the time this story was written, so it seems reasonable to think that I would have heard about this, but I don’t remember anything. I like looking back and thinking about how I consumed news at different ages. I feel like around this time, I definitely wasn’t consuming online news regularly. However, my mom also said she doesn’t remember this, so it might have been extremely under-covered.
The story was published on GoUpstate.com in July of 2007. It reported that Curtis Ballard, who was a science teacher at Easley High School, was charged with soliciting sex through the Internet. He was caught by deputies posing as 13-year-old girls. He had been teaching at the school for over 20 years and taught biology, anatomy and physiology. I also noticed the lack of coverage on this incident from other local news publications, which surprised me.