PORTLAND, Maine (July 7) -- A fourth-grade teacher in Falmouth, Maine, has apologized for playing the groom in a mock wedding to a student.
The Portland Press Herald reports that Paul Rosenblum agreed to participate after the girl proposed and his class at the Plummer-Motz School cajoled him.
At the brief playground ceremony during the lunch recess on June 18, Rosenblum wore a black graduation gown and a clown tie. The girl, whom the school district will not identify, had a sheet draped around her clothes for a gown. There was no kiss.
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The details of the fake ceremony were relayed to parents at the school in a letter from the principal, Karen Boffa. The letter accompanied a written apology from Rosenblum, confirming the events.
The school received several phone calls about the incident. Superintendent Barbara Powers said none of the calls had come from parents of Rosenblum's students.
"I think the misperception has come from people who don't know him at all and just wondered what he was thinking to do something this out of the ordinary, in terms of appropriate teacher-student relationships,"she said.
Rosenblum, who has been a teacher for 22 years, says he was only intending to indulge "a little girl's game of dress-up and make-believe." He called his consent to the fake wedding a "serious lapse in judgment" and says he is remorseful and "sick with regret."
One parent, Janet Dye, responded to Boffa's letter with support for Rosenblum. ""Teachers are no more perfect than parents (yikes!)," she wrote in an e-mail. "For parents to assume that teachers should be perfect (and worse to transfer that belief to their children) is the biggest mistake made here."
Powers wouldn't say whether any disciplinary action was taken.
"It's all being handled very deliberately by the department," she told the Herald.
