Teacher's summer surprise: forgotten ticket worth half a million

By Kate Northrop

A New Jersey teacher received a variety of gifts from their students' parents at the end of the school year, but one stood out among the rest: a lottery ticket worth $500,000.

Late June is the time parents usually give their children's teachers a thank-you present in New Jersey public schools, and one teacher was lucky to find out that their gifted lottery ticket was worth more than expected.

At the end of the school year, the anonymous teacher received a stack of scratch-off tickets from grateful parents, which sat in their car well into summer break. Only one random day in July did they decide to check them for any winners.

"I had a stack of cards as gifts, and I had forgotten I left them there," the player told the New Jersey Lottery. "One morning, I went out to the car and thought that I'd see if I won any gas money."

Two tickets deep into the pile, and there was not much to write home about. But then, the teacher arrived at a $10 "The Shore Thing" ticket. It was then and there that the player realized they had been keeping a top prize-winning ticket of $500,000 in their car for weeks.

"It probably wasn't smart of me [to leave the tickets in the car]," the winner admitted to Lottery officials while claiming their prize at a Lottery office. "I've been driving around with my puppy. He could've eaten them."

The teacher is winning in more ways than one — according to the Lottery, thirty cents of every dollar in ticket sales is directed to the State pension system, which provides support to teachers, as well as police, firefighters, and other public workers.

Since fiscal year 2018, the Lottery said, it has contributed over $8 billion to pensions.

And for this winner in particular, their prize will provide much more support from the Lottery than they could ever imagine.

"I get them as gifts, but I never imagined," they remarked. "For me this is life changing."

Prior to being gifted, the lucky ticket was sold at Gurdev Gas on Atlantic City Boulevard in Bayville.

The teacher claimed the first top prize of $500,000 out of the three available in the $10 "The Shore Thing" scratch-off game, which launched in May. There are also 11 out of 12 second-tier prizes of $5,000 and 10 out of 12 third-tier prizes of $2,000 remaining.

The overall odds of winning any prize in the game are 1 in 3.96.