STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

I use to always thinking homeschooling your kids was a little freaky, but now I am beginning to understand why parents do it. Apparently there are some parents that don't have a problem w/ this. They thought that teacher was just trying to get close to her students. WHAT!!!???
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Mom Upset Over Toe-licking Incident
Reported By: Jon Shirek
Web Editor: Manav Tanneeru
Last Modified: 5/31/2005 8:43:12 PM

Carroll County mother is accusing one of the teachers at her son's elementary school of having inappropriate physical contact with her son, having him lick the teacher's toes in exchange for candy.

The mother says she discovered what happened on Friday, when she saw a note, bearing the teacher's name in the signature, written in her 10-year-old son’s school yearbook.

“I saw a note from a teacher, saying, ‘Good luck next year. Don't lick anyone else's toes. You're silly. Love, Mrs. Kilpatrick,’” said Denise Strozier, the student’s mother. “So, I'm, like, okay. What is this about licking somebody's toes?”

She says her son, a student at Temple Elementary School, then described inappropriate physical contact this past February with teacher Jody Kilpatrick in front of a dozen other children.

“He said that [the teacher] says, ‘Well, everybody else has candy. And if you lick my toes, you can have some candy,’ And I said, ‘Are you sure that's what you [heard?]’” Strozier said. “He said, ‘Yes, ma'am, all my friends were there and I licked her toes, and I got candy.’”

Strozier says one of her son's friends also wrote in his yearbook a note similar to what she says the teacher wrote.

Strozier called the principal to complain, and she said the initial response from the school was simply to offer Strozier and her son a replacement yearbook, but only if she returned the one with the teacher's writing in it.

Strozier said the teacher apologized to her over the phone, but the mother wants the teacher fired.

“If she'll let my son lick her toes, who's to say she won't do something worse? So, if she doesn't have better judgment, she doesn't need to be there,” she said.

A spokesman for the superintendent and the school board said they had only recently become aware of the incident and were investigating.

Late Tuesday afternoon, the Carroll County sheriff's office confirmed that it has just launched an investigation of the mother's complaint as well.