The connection was obvious for anyone who cared to see it.
One parent after another stepped to a lectern at a Cheltenham school board meeting Tuesday night, each of them bemoaning the district’s handling of either the recent hazing scandal within the high school’s football program or a string of student-on-student assaults at Cheltenham Elementary. The alleged hazing led to criminal charges against four coaches and six players and was brutal: teammates holding down a 15-year-old sophomore so they could step on him with football spikes and poke at his buttocks with a broomstick. The alleged assaults at the elementary school, involving children in kindergarten and second grade, involved conduct and comments that were sexual in nature.
Leah Mulhearn, the board’s president, announced that the district would review its safety policies and that “football will not return until we address this,” only to duck behind the protective shield of the passive voice — “Mistakes were made” — when it came time to assign responsibility for the dual disasters. The anger among the meeting’s attendees was palpable and universal, and it was justified. These are not two crises on distinct, parallel tracks. They are linked, and there is no separating them.
It was impossible, after listening to some of those parents describe the abuse accusations at Cheltenham Elementary, not to think, What kind of school leaders ignore these incidents? The kind likely to ignore a parent who reports a violent attack in the football locker room. The Cheltenham school district has a culture problem, and that problem isn’t new. Does that assertion seem outlandish? It isn’t. In youth and high school athletics, certain patterns, even the worst kind, tend to repeat and perpetuate themselves.
“It seems some sort of disconnect,” the author Hank Nuwer, who for decades has been tracking hazing-related incidents and deaths, once told me. “You have to look at it from the outsider position and the insider position. The outsider sees it as sadistic. The people on the inside have the disconnect, particularly if they’ve gone through it themselves. ‘This needs to be done because it has been done to me. So we’re doing it to someone else.’”
Go to 2002, to Central Catholic High School in Pittsburgh, where two football players were charged with sexual assault after allegedly holding down a 15-year-old teammate and slapping him in the face with their genitals.
Go to West Chester’s Arrowhead Day Camp in 1966. The Roman Catholic High School football team was there for training camp. In a hazing prank, three players carried sophomore Lamonte Jenkins to a swimming pool sometime after the pool’s 8:30 p.m. closure, threw him in, then scurried back to their bunks. Jenkins drowned.
Go back to Pittsburgh, in 1962, when Richard Metz, 16, tried out for the Allegheny High School football team and, after the first day of practice, stayed out of the locker room showers to avoid being hazed. The next day, when two players wielded a pair of scissors and threatened to cut his hair, Metz pulled out a .22-caliber pistol that he had ordered in the mail and fired three shots at the players, hitting one of them in the right thigh. Six weeks later, Metz shot himself.
A “psychiatrist’s report showed that Richard had an inability to meet a crisis,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Alvin Rosensweet wrote on Oct. 1, 1962, the day after Metz’s death. “He felt he was only defending himself when his teammates goaded him into shooting.”
A young, troubled man who brings a gun to school … and turns it on other students … then dies by suicide. It doesn’t sound like something from the distant past. It sounds like the sort of atrocity too common in our time.
Yes, these episodes are anecdotal. They’re also predictable without proper oversight from the adults who are supposed to be in charge, without awareness and understanding of the conditions that can create them. One would think the omnipresence of smartphones and social media and the possibility that such abhorrent acts would be captured on camera and blasted out to the world would serve as deterrents to hazing. They don’t, and the additional, necessary guardrails didn’t exist at Cheltenham and don’t in too many other locker rooms. Incidents like these seem rare, but there’s no telling how often they actually occur.
“How likely,” Nuwer said, “are students to report this?”
They’re not likely at all. The victims are often too humiliated to reveal the abuse, and you can be sure that the perpetrators won’t be quick to confess. Somehow those lasting lessons weren’t delivered to enough Cheltenham football coaches and players, and based on the abuse parents described Tuesday night, those responsible for the district’s youngest students need to learn them, too.
There will be a review of the district from an outside attorney, and the high school football season has already been canceled, just as last season’s was. These are half-measures, and too late at that. Curtailing such cruelty comes down to stopping it before it starts, to cultivating an environment where everyone understands that there will be consequences for those who don’t meet the baseline for basic human decency.
It takes elected leaders who actually lead. It takes educators and administrators who wield wisdom and compassion and discipline in the proper proportions. It takes parents and students with the willingness to speak up, and it takes parents who have the strength, the humility, and the self-awareness to recognize that their children might be causing the chaos — and who take the steps to stop it. It takes a lot of elements that right now seem in short supply in the Cheltenham school district.
This column has been updated to reflect the outcome of one accusation of hazing.
