A Marion County school employee accused of illicitly taking drivers’ education vehicles home for personal use, getting in to a crash and trying to blame a student has been fired.

  • Teacher's assistant accused of misusing school vehicle
  • School officials say she failed to report a crash, falsified documents
  • School board agreed to terminate Malisa Stocker

The decision was made during a Marion County School Board meeting on Tuesday.

According to school officials, Malisa L. Stocker, a teacher’s assistant at North Marion High School, would drive herself to and from work in the vehicles. In a document recommending her dismal, officials said Stocker was “not authorized to operate any of the drivers’ education vehicles.”

School officials became aware of the situation last year after Stocker was involved in a crash while using one of the school’s vehicles.

“She was driving to work on County Road 326 after leaving a Dunkin Donuts,” on Dec. 8, 2016, school documents state. “This was prior to school hours and while Respondent (Stocker) was on personal business.”

Stocker failed to report the crash to her supervisors, and blamed a student for the crash, falsifying a crash report to state that a student hit a tree, the School Board said. It said Stocker pressured the student, referred to as "Student A" in the report, to go along with the false report on two separate occasions "because she knew she was not supposed to be out on the roadways with the drivers' education vehicle," the report states.

From the report:

"Respondent (Stocker) signed Student A out of class and dover her around the school campus looking for something that looked red that Student A could claim she had hit, as her grandfather's truck was red and had left paint residue on the drivers' education vehicle at the point of impact. When Respondent's efforts to locate a suitable red object were unsuccessful, Respondent and her sister went to the school campus at night, rode around until they found a tree from which they scraped bark and created tire tracks to make it appear a (sic) if Student A had hit the tree."