Porn is going mainstream, sure, but is straight-edge Palm Beach County ready for a former skin-flick actor to sit on its School Board? As outrageous as the idea might sound, David Mech -- a ex-porn actor and director who's been working as a math tutor in recent years -- has thrown his hat into the ring for the School Board's district 3 seat currently held by Karen Brill. And here's the kicker: The 38-year-old is probably the best candidate in the race.
We first told you about Mech back in May 2013, when he hit the news cycle after school officials found out about his life in porn, where he went by the name Dave Pounder. Until then, Mech had been running a math tutoring company, Happy/Fun Math Tutor, since leaving the business in 2010.
The unmarried Mech settled into a standard life after leaving the porn -- he owns a 1,100-square-foot condo in Boca Raton, serves as treasurer on his building's board, and has had no run-ins with law enforcement. Regardless, last year, the School Board higher-ups deemed him unfit to tutor when someone tipped them off about his adult film work. They promptly took down Mech's signage advertising his business. He then sued the district.
Based on his own frustrating experience smashing against the Teflon "morals" of the School Board, Mech decided to run for office. "I figured it would be a good way to inspire conversation," he tells New Times.
Mech is all about good conversation. College-educated, with a master's and work toward two PhDs, not to mention the author of his own book on the porn industry, he's a provocative one-man master's class on the morality of porn and the hypocrisy of straight society's reaction to the industry -- and that intellectual energy is powering his campaign.
On his campaign website, Mech has broken his campaign down into five agenda points -- technology, innovation, equality, sex education, and social values. Some of the in-classroom changes he's pushing for come out of firsthand experience working with students. For example, why not allow interested students to fulfill language requirements by learning computer coding, the language of the future?
