Levi's No Dropout, Insists Palin

Upset at reports suggesting her son-in-law to be, Levi Johnston, fiancé of daughter Bristol and father of Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston, born last weekend, is a high school dropout, Sarah Palin has been calling around to set the record straight. "You need to know that both Levi and Bristol are working their butts off to parent and going to school and working at the same time," she told People magazine in a voicemail message. After the Associated Press interviewed Johnston and reported he had dropped out of high school to work on the North Slope as an electrician, Palin called the wire service to say he continues to be enrolled in a high school through a correspondence program. And in a statement Palin confessed that she was not filled with unalloyed joy when Bristol told her she was pregnant. "When Bristol and Levi first told us the shocking news that she was pregnant, to be honest, we all at first looked at the situation with some fear and a bit of despair,” she wrote. And there is a cautionary note in the statement from Bristol: "Teenagers need to prevent pregnancy to begin with—this isn't ideal," she said. “Tripp is so perfectly precious; we love him with all our hearts."