A teacher at Old Town High School gave birth at the school on Tuesday, in an apparent first for the school.
Tori Hildreth, the school’s Jobs for Maine Graduates instructor, was full-term when she went to work that morning. She was already having contractions but they were inconsistent and more than an hour apart, suggesting that the birth of her child was near but not imminent.
She had been advised to come to the hospital when her water broke, but that hadn’t happened yet, and she didn’t want to start her maternity leave early. So, she kept teaching.
But by the afternoon the contractions had sped up to every few minutes and her students had started to take notice.
“They said, ‘You should go home and rest. You’re going to have a baby soon.’” she said. “And I was like, ‘yeah, I’m gonna have her tomorrow.’”
Hildreth called her mother, who works nearby and was at the school in three minutes. The school nurse, Jana Caron, and school resource officer Willy King were summoned to help, and a call was placed to emergency services, the school said in a Facebook post.
“The plan was to go to the hospital, but I stopped in the car and I said, ‘Hold on, I just need to make it through this one contraction before I can actually sit down,” Hildreth said. “And that contraction was the one that pushed her out into the world.”.
Her new daughter is named Bella Reese Dieuveuil.
Hildreth’s father, who works as a firefighter in Old Town, was called to the school and arrived on a fire truck just after Bella was born. Bella’s father, Mark Dieuveuil met them at the hospital later. Hildreth’s older daughter, Dianne, was happy to become a big sister.
“Everything happened pretty quickly,” Hildreth said. “At around 2:05, I sent my students over to the library, and by 2:18 I was in the parking lot holding my baby.”
According to Old Town High School it was the first known case of a teacher giving birth at the school.
