Schools

Ex-teacher pays after shimmying from ceiling

He loses his state teaching certificate permanently after the 2005 incident at Parrott Middle School.

By TOM MARSHALL, Times Staff Writer
Published January 26, 2008

BROOKSVILLE - Here's one thing you can't do and keep your teacher's license:

You can't creep up into the ceiling over the girls locker room and then claim it was all just a misunderstanding.

On Friday, former Hernando County teacher Daniel Ray Madril was permanently stripped of his Florida teaching certificate by the state Education Practices Commission.

The ruling comes nearly three years after his arrest on three misdemeanor charges of voyeurism.

Madril, then a 39-year-old physical education teacher at D.S. Parrott Middle School, was shimmying from an opening in the ceiling tiles to a shelf in the equipment room on the morning of March 3, 2005, when a female colleague walked in and asked him what he was up to.

Madril said he had just been playing a prank, throwing a basketball into the office of a female colleague to scare students in the adjoining locker room, according to police reports.

But there was no basketball, and female students and teachers had been changing or using the toilet at the time. Police said they would have been clearly visible through air vents to the prying eyes of, say, a gym teacher up in the crawl space.

Madril received community service time and probation under a pretrial intervention agreement with the State Attorney's Office, and he was fired by the School Board in May 2005.

He could not be reached for comment Friday on the loss of his teaching certificate.

Tom Marshall can be reached at tmarshall@sptimes.com or 352 584-5537.

[Last modified January 25, 2008, 20:43:11]