Two high school softball coaches in East Texas are accused of maliciously outing a sophomore player as a lesbian to her mother, then kicking her off the team.
And Kilgore Independent School District officials are accused of defending the coaches’ actions by arguing that they were “legally obligated” to disclose the girl’s sexual orientation to her parents.
After Fletcher and Newell finally let S.W. leave the locker room, they promptly phoned her mother and asked her to meet them at the field. When the mother arrived, the coaches told her that her daughter was a lesbian and gave her the phone number of the girlfriend.
When S.W.’s mother filed a complaint with the school district, officials responded by saying they were “legally obligated to share this information with the parent.”
“In other words, KISD’s policy mandates that teachers disclose students’ sexual orientation to their parents,” the suit states.
“Discrimination, bullying and the infliction of emotional trauma against students who are gay or believed to be gay is a nationally recognized problem,” the lawsuit states. “Defendants’ actions and policies exacerbate this problem and set a very harmful example to students, teachers, and parents in Kilgore ISD.”
According to the Kilgore News Herald, KISD Superintendent Jody Clements said the defendants don’t want to comment until they’ve had a chance to review the lawsuit.
“I haven’t seen any papers on it yet so I don’t have anything to say about it,” Clements told the News Herald on Monday, adding that the coaches also had not been served with the suit. “We feel confident that everything the district did was right.”
