Peeping gym teacher loses license

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 girl's 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 teacher's license 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 a hole in the ceiling 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.

He claimed he'd just been playing a prank, throwing a basketball into the adjoining 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 crawlspace.

Madril received community service time and probation under a pretrial intervention agreement with the State Attorney's office, and 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, Times staff writer