Leadership Failure

This week an East Coast high school cancelled its remaining football season. The freshman, sophomore and varsity teams will forfeit  approximately18 combined games. The sport season termination comes during an investigation into alleged hazing and bullying activities within the football program. This administrative decision is a blatant failure of adult leadership in that school district. The program stoppage is an example of cowardly leadership demonstrating a fear to address kids with negative behavior while ignoring the participation enjoyment and entitlement of 'good' kids in the program.


This reminds me of a time while coaching at Jacksonville high school when I went to our administration and asked why we no longer have sports' pep assemblies, which saluted the positive representative efforts of athletes. I was told that the general feeling amongst administrators and teachers believed such assemblies became problematic for faculty attempting to 'deal' with jerks, bums and clowns, which are found in most schools. Thus once again the well behaved 'good' kids were denied support and fun because of disruptive students.
I recall one year when that same high school partnered with a fast food restaurant and gave away sandwich-coupons to documented truant students if they attended school five days consecutively. I knew many 'A' students who were outstanding school citizens and never missed school; they got ZERO...jack shit for their attendance. Check out most public schools and you will discover 90% of rules are implemented because of 3% of the jerk-population.