CLEVELAND – The easy way out would have been to tell the graduates of Westlake High School that the misspelling on their diplomas was a final test.

Instead, Principal Timothy Freeman fell on his red pen, shouldering responsibility for the diplomas issued to 330 Westlake graduates at the Wolstein Center in Cleveland last Saturday that read board of “educaiton,” not “education.”

“I was sick to my stomach,” said Freeman, who said the documents had been proofread once and sent back for corrections because of problems with the signatures. The new version fixed that, but inserted the typo.

“We just cracked open the box and all of the signatures were fixed. We never even thought to go back and read the small print because we already had,” Freeman said.

Jostens reprinted and mailed new diplomas free of charge, but Freeman still called it “the bane of my existence” after a Cleveland morning radio show made fun of the school. “Our girls softball team had the highest GPA in the state, out of more than 700 teams,” said Freeman. “That’s not news, but a typographical error by Jostens gets two hours on the radio?”