A 39-year-old mother said she didn’t know the extent of the damage her 12-year-old daughter and friends planned to cause when she agreed to drive them to toilet paper a house in May.

The responsibility for that, Joanne E. Douglas said, “was solely on them.”

“What I did is take them.”

Still, Lancaster County Judge Gale Pokorny sentenced Douglas to 10 days in jail.

At her sentencing Friday for contributing to the delinquency of a child, she said what happened early May 20 was “the stupidest thing I ever did as a parent.”

But Douglas took issue with the allegation she watched from the car as the Pound Middle School seventh-graders smashed eggs against a teacher’s house, spelled out vulgarities on her sidewalk in pancake syrup, taped tampons on the doors, poured dishwashing liquid over the steps and poured household chemicals over the lawn.

“I did not see. I did not drive past the house. I did not know,” Douglas told Pokorny.

She said she didn’t know they had anything more than toilet paper and only learned on the way there they planned to TP a teacher’s home.

If she’d known the extent of what they intended to do, she said, she wouldn’t have taken them — to a teacher’s house or anyone’s.

“I find it a little bit hard to believe that Miss Douglas didn’t know what was going on,” Deputy County Attorney Rodney Reuter  said.

He said he didn’t see how she couldn’t have understood what was going on or not see the eggs and syrup and other things in the car.

It’s had a profound impact on the victim, he said. And everyone at school knew it happened.

“Not only was this an incredibly dumb act, but this was an incredibly dumb act against an authority figure,” Reuter said.

Douglas’ attorney, Deputy Public Defender Paul Cooney, said his client made mistakes that night.

The first, he said, was agreeing to take them when she could have dissuaded them. The second was continuing after learning the house was a teacher’s.

“She’s made serious mistakes,” Cooney said. “She now understands those mistakes.”

Douglas has no previous convictions, and Cooney said restitution already has been divided among the kids and paid as part of diversion.

He asked Pokorny to consider a sentence that would not take the single mom away from her two kids.

But Pokorny said that as the kids concocted their plans, Douglas immediately became an active participant and may even have been the one to find the teacher’s address online.

And he questioned if she would have had all the supplies the kids used without going to get them.

He also took issue with what Douglas told a probation officer in a pre-sentence report — that the girls would have done it even without her driving them — despite the fact it was  midnight and the house was several miles across town.

“Children, particularly young children like those here … they learn by example,” he told her. “They acquire the morals and ethics of their parents.”

He said it wouldn’t come as any surprise to find her children standing before a judge in a decade or so.

“She expresses not a particle of remorse,” Pokorny said.

He said Douglas maintains lots of parents do what she did “and that the whole thing simply isn’t ‘that big a deal.’”

“You’re wrong Miss Douglas,” he said. “This is a big deal.”

Then he sentenced her to 10 days in jail and ordered her to pay a $1,000 fine.

Reach Lori Pilger at 473-7237 or lpilger@journalstar.com.