Once, when Raphael Morris was 10 years old, he and his father drove through Hillsdale, Missouri, just a few miles from their hometown, Pagedale, and stopped in front of Greenwood Cemetery. “You have family in there,” his father told him. As a child, Morris said, he didn’t think much of the news and didn’t think twice about the cemetery.

Until more than 50 years later.

Morris found himself back at the burial grounds in 2016 after seeing a news program about what poor condition the land was in. So, he traveled just 15 minutes from his home in Olivette to the cemetery to see for himself.

“It was absolutely nothing but a forest. You couldn’t see a single headstone on the property,” said Morris, now 69. By then, he said, Greenwood was mostly riddled with discarded mattresses, television sets, furniture and other garbage dumped there over the years.

Tyler Clay Morgan is now out of a teaching job. He resigned from his role as a music teacher at West Irvine Intermediate School in Kentucky on Monday after facing controversy over this colorful message of support to his students:

Kentucky teacher Laura Hartke was asked to give an outside educator's perspective on the comment about discussing topics "far beyond the music curriculum" and she said, "I'm not privy to the conversations that happened, but conversations outside of curriculum happen every day," Hartke said. "Every day. There's no teacher that just reads from a book and just delivers you content. Kids have questions. They have conversations. We are educating whole children. So the thought that the conversation being outside of curriculum is alarming to him, is alarming to me."