Husband’s Pot Comes Between Teacher and Her Job

Vicki Sherling of Moultrie, Ga., named 1989 Teacher of the Year in Colquitt County, isn’t allowed back in the classroom. Sherling was acquitted this week of charges that she grew marijuana in a greenhouse in her back yard. But for now, Supt. Billy Mock says he’s not going to rehire her. Mock explained that the former high school chemistry teacher knew her husband, Mike, smoked pot and said that the issue is one of morality. Her husband, a former teacher and lawyer, has pleaded guilty to drug charges and is awaiting sentencing. “She admitted in our hearing that she knew it was going on, that it was being used,” Mock said. Sherling, 38, is now appealing her dismissal to the state Board of Education. “I feel great that finally the truth got out and I have cleared my name, which was my intent,” she said. “I had the truth on my side.” She has denied ever smoking marijuana and testified that she had pleaded with her husband to stop smoking it.

--”I won fair and square,” said Miss America Gretchen Carlson from St. Paul, Minn. “I’m not refuting anything. I’m standing above it. This has been a wonderful year, and I have a ton of people to thank for that. Unfortunately, someone has seen fit to tarnish that.” TV Guide, in its Sept. 2 issue, said that judges failed to count interview scores in last year’s pageant. “We all knew way before the pageant that the interview would not be balloted on the final night,” Carlson said. “But it was balloted in the preliminaries, in which the finalists were chosen.” Carlson will end her reign Sept. 12.

--Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has named six fellows, including candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and former Florida Gov. Reubin Askew and ex-Christian Science Monitor Editor Katherine Fanning. Others selected at the school’s Institute of Politics in Cambridge, Mass., are Nancy Risque Rohrbach, a former senior aide in the Ronald Reagan White House; Bernard Sanders of Burlington, Vt., a former Socialist mayor; former Sen. Paul S. Trible Jr. (R-Va.), and Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza and an expert on Mexican-American civil rights. Each will direct a non-credit student study group in the fall semester.