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Kaylee Timonet didn’t suspect anything last week when the principal summoned her. The 17-year-old senior is the student body president of her public high school in Walker, La., and met with him frequently.

But when Kaylee got to his office, Principal Jason St. Pierre confronted her with a video of her dancing at a homecoming after-party off campus three days earlier, chastising her for not living up to “God’s ideals,” Kaylee said in a 3½-minute TikTok video that’s been viewed 1 million times. He stripped her of her presidency and revoked his endorsement for a college scholarship she was applying for, she said in the video.

“I hysterically started crying,” Kaylee added.

In the nine days since that meeting, news of Kaylee’s punishment has roiled Walker, a city of about 6,400 people that’s outside Baton Rouge. Her mother, Rachel, scolded St. Pierre for berating her daughter for not living up to his idea of religious morality. She described it as a violation of separation of church and state in an interview with Unfiltered With Kiran, a local news website founded by a journalist. Dozens of her fellow students staged a walkout Monday to protest St. Pierre’s decision to discipline Kaylee. Parents have changed profile pictures on social media accounts to silhouette images of a dancer emblazoned with the rallying cries “Let the Girl Dance” and “I stand with Kaylee Timonet.” One school board member called the punishment “ridiculous.”

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Under pressure, St. Pierre on Monday issued a statement on the Walker High School website, saying he’d apologized to Kaylee and her mother, reinstated Kaylee as student government president and agreed to once again endorse her for college scholarships. He has since told district officials that he plans to take a leave of absence for the rest of the school year, Livingston Parish Public Schools Superintendent Joe Murphy said in a statement sent Wednesday to The Washington Post through a district spokeswoman.

Kaylee and Rachel Timonet did not respond to requests for comment.

On Sept. 30, Kaylee and her mother attended a private party after homecoming at a local country club, where the DJ shot video of Kaylee laughing and dancing with her friends, Unfiltered reported. The video, which has since been taken down, showed Kaylee dancing behind one of her friends who was twerking, “kind of like hyping her up,” Kaylee told the online news outlet. Her mother watched the video before the DJ posted it to social media.

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“I didn’t see anything wrong with what my daughter was doing in the video,” Timonet told Unfiltered. “My child was not representing the school in any way, shape or form at the party.”

Three days later, St. Pierre called Kaylee to his office at the start of the school day, she said in her TikTok. When she arrived, St. Pierre reportedly told her he was stripping her of her title as student government president and rescinding his support to help her win college scholarships. St. Pierre, who was accompanied by one of his assistant principals, showed her the video of her dancing at the party, chastising her for not living up to “God’s ideals,” she told Unfiltered.

Kaylee started sobbing.

“I was basically told that I need to change my morals and values because I was not living in God’s ideals,” Kylee said in her TikTok video, adding that the principal told her he was “worried about my afterlife.”

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Kaylee told Unfiltered that she has worked hard her entire academic career to get to her senior year with a résumé stacked with a sterling grade-point average, myriad extracurriculars, and a host of honors and awards. She tutors younger students. She serves on student government, which she described to the news outlet as the “best thing that happened to me during high school.” She was recently selected as the most outstanding female volunteer by the Greater Baton Rouge State Fair, an honor for which St. Pierre praised her in his LinkedIn profile.

St. Pierre’s punishment seemed to ruin everything she had built, she said in her TikTok video.

Kaylee went home and told her mother what happened. The next morning, Timonet told Unfiltered, she met with St. Pierre, who defended his actions. He reportedly told Timonet that during his meeting with her daughter, he had printed out Bible verses and shown them to her, then sent her on her way with a “religious bracelet.”

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St. Pierre, as a principal at a public school, shouldn’t have been interrogating her daughter about religion and chastising her for not living up to his moral standards, Timonet said to the news outlet.

“That is not for anybody to do other than my family,” she said, according to Unfiltered. “ … It’s a public school, not a private school. He has no right to discuss any sort of religion with my child.”

The public backlash to the punishment was swift. Kellee Hennessy Dickerson, a Livingston Parish school board member, said she had been flooded with calls about St. Pierre disciplining Timonet, which she called “harsh and unfair.” On Monday, 40 of Timonet’s classmates staged a walkout to protest her punishment, the Advocate reported.

By then, St. Pierre’s statement had already been posted on the high school’s website, saying he had apologized to Kaylee and her mother, reinstated Kaylee as student government president and agreed to once again endorse her for a college scholarship. He conceded that he had broached the subject of religious beliefs while talking with Kaylee about the dance party.

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“While that conversation was meant with the best intentions, I do understand it is not my responsibility to determine what students’ or others’ religious beliefs may be — that should be the responsibility of the individual,” St. Pierre said.

In a video posted later that day by Unfiltered, Kaylee and her mother responded, saying that St. Pierre’s apology was too little, too late. The deadline had passed for the scholarship for which she needed her principal’s backing.

“The damage that he’s done to her is done,” Timonet said.

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