Jarretta Hamilton was excited as could be when she found she was pregnant with her sixth child--until she found out that child would cost her her job.
A widower and mother of five children from her first marriage, Hamilton was working as a fourth grade teacher at the Southerland Christian School in Saint Cloud, Florida when she met Samuel Treftz and started dating. They got engaged and three weeks before they said I do, she conceived her daughter.
But when she went to the school to ask for a standard six-week maternity leave in the fall, she says they first balked at the cost to cover her, then questioned her conception date. Soon after she was terminated from her position due to "fornication, sex outside of marriage." And, she says, they told all her co-workers about it, too.
Seriously? I mean, sure, in an ideal world, teachers would serve as role models to their students. But this isn't exactly Pamela Smart, convicted of having sex with her students and convincing them to murder her husband, now is it? This is an adult woman, conceiving a child, out of love, with the man she planned to marry 21 days later. Heck, she could have just lied and kept her job. But because she was honest to a very invasive, unfair question asked the administration, she was given a pink slip instead of a baby shower.
I could understand a little better if Hamilton had signed some kind of morality contract--specifically stating she would not engage in premarital sex or other such activities--at least she'd know what she was getting into. But she didn't--and she claims she didn't even know she was doing anything wrong. So was it really a case of moral depravity that prompted her dismissal? Or perhaps a school looking to make a costly leave of absence go away?
