Sleepy Hill Middle School eighth-grader Thomas Cancellare missed his FCAT Writes test last week because he was home sick.
"I felt horrible," Cancellare said. "I could barely get out of the chair without throwing up."
He had a doctor's note to prove he wasn't faking, but when he came back to the Lakeland school this week, his teacher put a sign around his neck. Cancellare said he was humiliated.
"It said ... 'I decided to come to school today, but I didn't come to school during the FCAT,'" he said.
Cancellare claims the teacher did nothing as classmates laughed at him.
"She just made me feel like I'm worthless," he said.
According to Cancellare, school principal Dr. Kathryn Blackburn took the sign off his neck when she saw kids laughing at him in the lunchroom.
Needless to say, when Cancellare's mother, Daphne, found out, she was ... upset.
"I was flipping mad," she said. "I was ranting and raving in my house, looking up laws (to find out if) what she had done was wrong."
In the school's defense, Daphne Cancellare said she was told by Dr. Blackburn the teacher was wrong to put the sign on her son. The teacher did give the boy a handwritten letter of apology.
In the note, the teacher wrote that she meant for the experience to be a friendly correction rather than a ridicule and felt she had a good rapport with Cancellare.
But the apology letter wasn't good enough for the mother, who said she wants formal discipline for, what she termed, bullying from her son's former teacher.
"There is a zero tolerance policy for students to bully each other," Daphne Cancellare said. "Well, how is there a no-tolerance (policy) if they allow a teacher to bully a student?"
Thomas Cancellare said he was transferred to a new teacher.
Neither the principal nor the teacher in question responded to requests for comment. Bay News 9 is not identifying the teacher because she has not told her side of the story.