Teacher Moonlighting as Bikini Mate Cut Loose

April 30, 2008— -- 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.

"I wasn't making enough money," Shepherd, a Florida native and self-described lifelong angler, told ABC News. "This was perfect because I could get paid to fish. It was easy money. In two days fishing, I make more that I do in a week teaching."

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.

She also said school officials did not know about her job as a "bikini" mate until after they filed her release paperwork. "As far as her claim about the boat job, we did not know about that until after she had been non-renewed," Karst said.