Things that happen at the Disney College Program clearly don’t stay at the Disney College Program. Shannon Sullivan, a participant in the program who was assigned to work in Magic Kingdom restaurants, was fired — and then quickly rehired — after tweeting a photo of a sign that was posted in a Walt Disney World break room. The sign in question dealt with how to handle a situation if guests inquired whether there were alligators in the water around Tom Sawyer Island. (Interest has been heightened following the death of a two-year-old boy by an alligator at a Disney resort last month.) It instructed employees to feed the answer of: “‘Not that we know of, but if we see one, we will call Pest Management to have them removed.’ Please do not say that we have seen them before.â€
Disney soon removed the sign from the break room, saying the sign “had not [been] authorized†to be posted. “I was very offended by it and I was pretty vocal about it,†Sullivan said. “At this point it became my morals and my integrity and what I believe in. I thought, if I lose my job because of that, it’s worth it to me.†Shortly after the tweet was posted, a manager confronted Sullivan and fired her, and she was escorted from the park. However, following inquiries from the Orlando Sentinel about the termination, Disney’s Hollywood Studios vice-president Dan Cockerell personally visited Sullivan and offered her the position back, which she accepted.