The World Through My Eyes

A high school science teacher in Florida has been booted from class, a decision she claims administrators made not based on poor job performance but on her moonlighting gig as a bikini mate aboard a local charter fishing boat.Tiffany Shepherd, 30, a college-educated single mother of three children, ages 2, 6, and 9, had worked for four years in Florida's St. Lucie County School District, just north of Palm Beach, before an ugly divorce early this year caused enough financial strain that she had to seek a second job. Earlier this month, the buxom blond took a job working for Gil Coombes and his wife, Kat, as a part of their charter fishing boat operation, Smokin' Em Charters. She was one of a handful of attractive women hired to roll out a new business concept combining fishing with bikini-clad, and sometimes topless, female mates. Shepherd said that she has not and will not do a topless charter. Her first fishing trip, Shepherd said, was Saturday, April 19. Four days later, she called into her school, Port St. Lucie High, to arrange for a substitute in order to attend a doctor's appointment. In the process, she learned that she was not welcome back for the rest of the year, nor would she have her annual contract for the 2008-09 school year renewed. "They're under the impression I'm doing a topless charter, that I'm a stripper," Shepherd said. "I wasn't doing anything wrong. I wasn't in a thong, I was in a regular bathing suit." Janice Karst, a school district spokesman, told ABC News that the decision to release Shepherd was based on more than 30 days of unexcused absences from school, a truancy that had already earned her two written reprimands this year. [Source]

So what do you think? Do you believe that it was due to the absences or do you think that her being a bikini mate was the reason they booted her? I can see from the employer stand point that if she missed the days that they say she did and that they were unexcused I can see why they fired her. So this may be a way for her just to ruffle some feathers and get some attention. Yet if they did fire her because she was a bikini mate I believe that there needs to be some type of repercussion on the school. I know with the way the economy is now there are more workers than jobs, but that shouldn't give the employers a reason to mistreat employees. Now I understand that she is a teacher and with that comes some responsibility, but I believe that she should be able to conduct herself how she pleases outside of the school/work. It would be one thing if she was coming into school in her bikini, but this is a second job so that she can provide for her children. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out.