Lessons To Be Learned From Coaching Affair

The week after Thanksgiving, Waitsburg School District Superintendent Dr. Carol Clarke has an unenviable task in front of her. She has to sort out whether the three volleyball coaches who were suspended in the aftermath of a contentious team meeting were treated fairly. At a meeting scheduled for Wednesday, Dec. 1, she will hear from the suspended coaches, Jessie Buehler, Katie Buehler and Tressa Robbins, and from school district officials, most likely athletics director and high school principal Stephanie Wooderchak and possibly others who were involved in the investigation of the controversial team meeting.

The three coaches were suspended on Friday, Oct. 15, after a parent of one of the team's players filed a formal complaint alleging that the women created a climate leading to harassment, intimidation and bullying against the player, a team leader whom the coaches and some of the players felt had been counterproductive during the season.

School officials who investigated the claim report­edly said they found corroborating witnesses and gathered enough evidence to support it, prompting the district to suspend the entire staff of a sports program for the first time in its history.

Dr. Clarke was out of town on school business at the time. The affair has raised a number of questions regarding the handling of the team meeting itself, the complaint investiga­tion and the dismissal of the coaches. The coaches themselves have already said they could have and probably should have handled their team meeting differently.

In a recent interview, Dr. Clarke said the school offi­cials who investigated the incident had what they felt they needed to make the suspension decision and followed "due process."

But the coaches dispute this, saying the suspension deci­sion was made before they had a chance to air their side of the story and that the district did not follow its own policies and procedures in communicating the charges against them.

Wednesday's hearing is the second, or "appeal," part of the investigation in which Dr. Clarke will try to find out if the coaches had a fair shot at refuting the charges before being dismissed for the short remainder of the Cardinals' volleyball season.

Interestingly, the school district's policies allow students who are under investigation of a crime by law enforcement officials to continue playing pending the query's outcome (based on the legal principle called the "presumption of innocence"), while coaches apparently face immediate dismissal before their two-part investigation has been con­cluded. Some of the other players and parents from the volleyball team said they were shocked by the allegations and by the district's sanctions because they were so out of character with the three coaches' personalities, standing and reputa­tion. The district's procedure lists four types of disciplinary action: oral reprimand, written reprimand, suspension/dis­charge and demotion.

If the team meeting rose the level of "harassment, intimi­dation or bullying," an allegation the coaches might dispute, why did the district resort to suspension instead of one of the two lesser sanctions and let the coaches stay with the team for the duration?

Why did the district conduct the investigation so quickly instead of taking the 30 days it allows itself under its policies to respond to a parent's complaint?

And, if reports from insiders at the district's own sus­pension meeting with the coaches are true, why was the dismissal decision made with only one of the WP's sports combine's athletics directors agreeing to it? Dr. Clarke said the severity of the sanction was based on the severity of the corroborated allegations and its speed was appropriate given that district officials felt the evidence gathered was complete. But she also acknowledged the two districts may have some work to do in clarifying their athletics disciplinary proce­dures.

"We haven't had this situ­ation before," she said. "This caught us off guard." We believe the incident and its aftermath caught ev­erybody off guard, allowing a coaching predicament that could have been avoided with better personal and profes­sional judgment, training, guidelines and policies to spin out of control and cause potentially irretrievable dam­age to a number of relation­ships and reputations. Jessie and Katie Buehler this year will not act as as­sistant

basketball coaches to head coach Jerry Baker as they have in years past and many players will miss them. It's unclear how the emotion­al fallout from the incident will affect many of the same students who will soon begin the Cardinals' basketball sea­son. It's not even clear if all of them still have an appetite for team sports.

What seems clear to us, however, is that little can gained from entrenchment and that, as in sports, the parties can learn much from adversity. Both sides need to recognize that the unfortu­nate episode exposed weak­nesses that can be addressed constructively so similar incidents can be prevented. The Buehler sisters have probably learned a profes­sional lesson by now, while the two districts see the mer­its of reviewing their policies and make them better. We hope the two sides will come to a mutually agreeable resolution whose legacy will make this the only coaching staff suspension in the dis­tricts' history.