At what point does playing hooky go too far? Well, one Florida teacher faked an illness for nearly a year before she finally got caught and fired. According to school district officials in Polk County Florida, Ashley Barker, a first-grade teacher at Laurel Elementary School, came up with one convincing story of an illness she claimed she and her father were dying from.
According to the Daily Mail, Barker sent over 120 letters to the principal during her absence explaining that she couldn’t come teach her class because she and her father were dying from an unnamed terminal illness.
WFTV news reported that the school eventually grew suspicious after hearing parents and other teachers saying that they had seen her out and that she really wasn’t sick. It was then that school and district officials demanded that Barker give them some real proof that she was sick. Of course, since Barker wasn’t really sick and didn’t any proof, she decided to finally come forward and confess to her year of lies.
Parents weren’t very happy to find out that the teacher had not only been lying to co-workers but also to her students. “Wow. That’s kind of scary. Because if she lies about that, she can lie about anything,” one parent told WFTV.
