Smokn' Em Charters          

Help Tiffany Shepherd

Just in case you don't know much about Tiffany Shepherd we have added a few of the news video clips and just a few random items written about Tiffany.

Now we are holding a fund raiser to help Tiffany with her attorney fees in hopes of getting her teaching job back in St. Lucie County. SEE BOTTOM OF PAGE FOR DETAILS !

    

Everybody knows the bikini teacher, or knows of her, at least - the inauspicious departure from Port St. Lucie High School, the weekend fishing charters, the offer from Playboy that she's about to accept.

Say "bikini teacher," and every-one has an opinion: Shame on her for missing so many days of school. She got a raw deal. She got what she deserved. She's a good teacher. She's a bad teacher.

Wowza, she looks good in a bikini.

It's been almost a month since all hell broke loose, and she hesitates to answer her phone.

Instead, right now, she's standing in her kitchen, using a paring knife to cut a hole in a tiny newborn diaper. The monkey needs a change.

Surreal, right? The bikini teacher, known to many as a buxom blonde in a plaid bathing suit, is now sitting on her overstuffed, brown couch, dusting a capuchin's bum with a poof of baby powder and fitting his tail through that hole in the diaper.

The bikini teacher has a monkey. And a dog. She also has three young sons, and a college degree, and a painted wooden sign on her kitchen wall that says "Wishes won't wash dishes."

And she has a name: Tiffany Shepherd. The reductive title "bikini teacher" makes it easier to judge, to make black and white what in reality is unavoidably gray. But here she is: Tiffany, a 30-year-old with her feet propped on her coffee table, offering a green grape to a monkey and talking about her kids.

It's a weird time for her, and has been ever since the third week of April, when school district officials informed the Port St. Lucie High School biology teacher, in her first year at that school, that her contract wouldn't be renewed for next year. She also was told not to finish out the school year.

District officials say it's because she missed more than 30 days of work this school year. Tiffany says it's because of her second job, as a bikini-wearing mate for Smokin' Em Charters. Officials say they didn't know about her second job when they made their decision. Tiffany says they did.

So it became a big tangle of they-say-she-says, and then the media descended - Inside Edition, The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet in New York City, most of the radio stations in this area. Playboy made an offer.

It was because of the bikinis.

The female mates on Smokin' Em Charters wear bikinis. In fact, the main job requirements are a pleasant disposition and the ability to look hot in a bikini. And Tiffany does. So the picture got out, the one of her sitting on the edge of the charter boat, smiling up at the camera and wearing a pink plaid bikini.

She bought that bikini at Wal-Mart. Teachers don't make a lot.

"That's why I got the second job," she explains.

She had worked off and on for 10 years as a server at Red Lobster, but a weeknight shift there meant she didn't get home until after 11 p.m., and her days typically began before 5 a.m. Plus, she infrequently saw her boys, and it was beginning to look like she would get visitation rather than equal custody in a divorce.

So she contacted Kathi Coombes, who co-owns Smokin' Em Charters with her husband, Harold "Captain Gil" Coombes.

The business had been in the news after being asked to leave the Fort Pierce city marina for violating the marina's family-friendly atmosphere. Tiffany had followed the debate on a local newspaper Web site and remembers reading an angry, impulsive comment Kathi wrote in response to a story. The comment had grammar and spelling errors, "and, as a teacher, I read it and cringed," Tiffany remembers. But then she saw that Kathi went back and fixed her mistakes. Tiffany was charmed.

She called Kathi. Tiffany could work weekends, make $300 in four hours, have more time with her sons, get out on a boat and fish. Before accepting the job, she says she talked about it with her sons, who are 9, 6 and 3. She ran it by her dad and her mom and stepdad. She says everyone told her to go for it.

The second weekend in April, she worked on her first charter.

"She was great," Harold Coombes remembers. "It was like a mini-biology lesson - she was pointing out all the fish and birds, talking about the life cycle of turtles. Everyone loved her."

But the following week, she was asked to leave the school, and before she could catch her breath, a slide show of photos of her had racked up tens of thousands of hits on The Palm Beach Post Web site.

There was no way she could have kept them secret. Smokin' Em Charters is on myspace and has pages for all the bikini mates. Plus, Tiffany herself is on MySpace, with a public page for her students and a private one for her friends.

Maybe she could be accused of naiveté, thinking anything could stay private for long in the Information Age, or of using her looks to get ahead. On the other hand, can she be faulted for using her resources?

"I've always been really independent," she says. "I've always taken care of myself. I'll do whatever I have to to make sure my kids are well taken care of. The whole reason why I do everything I do is I want my kids to look back and be proud of me."

She tries to shelter them from this "bikini teacher" furor. (She makes sure they are out of the house when she talks to reporters.) She knows her 9-year-old is aware of what's going on; she caught him watching videos of her on YouTube, she says, and made him stop.

So her life is unconventional. In some ways, it always has been. She grew up in Okeechobee, her parents divorced when she was young, and she helped care for her two younger sisters. It wasn't all premature responsibility, of course - she played softball through middle school, helped rescue horses, cared for any animal that came her way, her father remembers. And, she proudly points out, she graduated in the top 2 percent of her class at Okeechobee High School.

At 18, she went right to work, as a prison guard and at the Hibiscus Children's Center. She met the father of her oldest son, Rafe, and the relationship ended badly. She met and married the father of her two youngest, Austin and Lane, and decided she needed to go to college.

With one and then two kids, she started at Indian River Community College and finished at Florida Atlantic University with a degree in pre-med. She wrote papers with babies on her lap. She says she couldn't afford an unpaid semester of student teaching, but instead went right to work at St. Lucie West Centennial High School.

For three years there, she taught biology, marine biology and other science courses but left when her contract wasn't renewed. She says it was because of a disagreement with her supervisor - she missed about seven weeks of school when her youngest son, Lane, whose twin died at five months in-utero, started having seizures. She thought she would lose him, too.

That's when she got the tattoo on her left shoulder, with her three sons' names. Enough people have asked about it with skeptically arched eyebrows that she says those are the names of boyfriends.

Because people are going to think what they will, and there's nothing she can do about it.

It's so easy for the armchair judge in everyone to sniff at her choices. She has other tattoos. And a MySpace page. And several bikinis. And a divorce that's not final, and a handsome new boyfriend. And she smokes the occasional cigarette. And, and, and ...

Except spend a few hours with her, and it's clear that she's just ... normal. Friendly. Walk in the door, and she offers a soda. She smiles. She chats.

She's a regular person. A Florida girl. A working mom. She fiercely loves her boys. She got the monkey because she thought it would be interesting for her students. She laughs easily. She's refreshingly candid: Yes, the breasts are real. No, she didn't have liposuction, after three pregnancies, she did the Before and After diet. Yes, she'd like more kids. Yes, she wants to keep teaching but doubts she'll be able to. She needs six more classes to finish her master's degree at FAU.

She'll even explain, albeit hesitantly, that her marriage was good, but then it wasn't, and one awful morning, in a heartbroken fever, she whipped around a car on St. Lucie West near I-95 and crashed into a pole. That's when, she says, the migraines started, the ones that kept her out of school all those days this year. All her absences are excused by her neurologist, she says, though the school district disputes it.

But that's just back to the they-say-she-says that has defined the past month. Right now, she can't worry about it because rent's due for the pumpkin-colored house with two small bikes and a skateboard near the front door. She worries about money.

Since the news broke, many Smokin' Em clients have requested her on their charters, but for topless ones, and she says she just couldn't do it. But with her checking-account balance in free-fall, she had second thoughts. A regular charter came through last weekend, though, and she's back to planning an uncertain future.

And then she and her boys walk over to the skate park, then come home for an evening of dinner, story time and Guitar Hero, while the monkey runs in happy circles - another regular day in the normal life of the bikini teacher.

By RACHEL SAUER

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Lets Help Tiffany

For $50.00 you can enter to win a Full Day fishing charter Offshore, plus our girl Tiffany will join you for the entire day along with one of our other Bikini mates. That is a value of $1,650.00 for just $50.00 !!!! It can't get any better then that ! All profits will go towards Tiffany's attorney fees. We will pick a winner and announce it here on September 19th 2008. For this offshore trip you will be able to take 5 friends along with you ! So it's a Full Day 8hrs Offshore fishing with 2 Hot ladies one being Tiffany herself with you and 5 of your friends !!! All it takes is $50.00 !!!

If you would like to buy a chance to win this fishing trip please fill out the form below ALL information MUST be given

All personal information given will be kept by Smokin' Em Charters until September 19th 2008. Your information will not be sold off or used for spamming. Upon picking a winner on September 19th all contestant's information will be deleted from our system.

Thank You & Good Luck