At first, Michelle Tetschner thought the person on the other end of the phone was joking. It was 2023, and the call came from the University of North Florida, where her son Raymond, who has Down syndrome, was enrolled in a life-skills day program. The woman on the line sounded alarmingly serious.
Raymond was being suspended, and Tetschner was told she needed to come pick him up immediately. The news left her momentarily stunned before she broke into laughter.
“It was the word they used that got me first,” Tetschner tells TODAY.com. “They said Raymond was ‘soliciting for cookies.’” The term — more commonly associated with far more serious offenses — struck her as jarring. Then came the explanation itself…