The most damning line in seven pages stuffed with one damning line after another came in the next-to-last paragraph of the report filed by lawyers with the firm Drummond Woodsum during their weekslong investigation into allegations of hazing at Lisbon High School.
“This suggests the problem is rooted in the culture of the program that shapes the attitudes of the players, who want to project a veneer of toughness when these incidents happen to them instead of speaking up or putting an end to the hazing that they witness or experienced,” Tom Trenholm and Kelsey Cromie wrote.
Lisbon doesn’t have a football team, and it appears it hasn’t had a team in quite some time. What it has is a gang of bullies masquerading as football players. What it has is institutionalized hazing.
Drummond Woodsum interviewed Lisbon High students during its investigation. According to the report, the athletes interviewed viewed what happened as nothing more than horseplay, but at the same time, they wanted to keep what was happening a secret.
Some Lisbon staff reported to Trenholm and Cromie that they overheard football players tell their teammates not to cooperate with the investigation. Some players told the investigators they were told to keep their mouths shut about what happened.
That behavior suggests the football team knew what was happening was wrong, but it did it anyway, in some skewed nod to tradition or simply fitting in. Whatever team culture existed at Lisbon had been warped into this mess that cannot be called a team in any sense.
Teammates never treat each other with such abject disrespect. Strong team culture comes from universal support, not rampant humiliation. Teammates do not trap younger teammates behind a chain-link door and repeatedly poke them with a broom handle, as alleged in the Drummond Woodsum report. Teammates do not whip each other with belts, also alleged in the report.
What the Lisbon School Committee and Superintendent Richard Green do next will determine if Lisbon is serious about confronting this problem, or if it wants to create the illusion of action.
“Conversations related to our next steps will be on-going, including the process for appealing any potential MPA sanctions, but our primary concern right now is providing support for our students,” Green wrote in an email to the Press Herald Tuesday morning.
High school varsity teams that can’t complete a season face a two-year ban from competition, according to Maine Principals’ Association rules. Lisbon forfeited its final four football games of the season.
Schools whose varsity sports teams couldn’t finish a season can file an appeal to the MPA’s Interscholastic Management Committee to have the two-year ban waived.
But if figuring out a way to appeal potential punishment is even on your radar at this stage, you have already failed in your response. You’re not thinking of how to make real change and you’re not ready to have the difficult internal conversations. You’re thinking, how can we make this go away? That’s a hollow way forward. It’s a fresh coat of paint on a house with a rotten foundation.
The conversations that need to happen in Lisbon will be painful. They should be honest, and they should include an admission of guilt from all adults involved. By turning a blind eye to institutionalized hazing, which the report concludes possibly happened in past seasons, they failed. If coaches and teachers who have access to the locker room, where much of the hazing is alleged to have occurred, and truly didn’t know it was happening, they’re not paying enough attention to be trusted in a supervisory role. If they knew it was happening and chalked it up to “boys being boys,” their supervisory role should be forfeited.
The seven students removed from the football team earlier this month should be barred from further athletic participation, period. Their high school athletic careers are over. Expulsion for those seven should be on the table, and an investigation should be conducted to see if other Lisbon athletic teams, boys or girls, acted as abhorrently as members of the football team. The report states that some students described hazing that occurred in other sports as well. If that proves to be the case, shut down athletics for the complete school year. The locker rooms should not be open unless there is adult supervision.
Every school in the state should be paying attention to what’s happening in Lisbon, just like every school in the state should have been paying attention to what happened in Brunswick three years ago. There, the football season was shut down and coach Dan Cooper was fired in the wake of a hazing investigation at a preseason team retreat. If you tell yourself it can’t happen at your school, you are either naive or willfully ignorant. Anti-hazing and anti-bullying policies at every school need to be reviewed with every student. Providing a student a handbook full of rules doesn’t cut it.
This is also playing out in the legal system. Neil McLean Jr., the district attorney for Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford Counties, received a report from the Lisbon police on a specific hazing incident that resulted in a criminal complaint.
The next move belongs to Green and the Lisbon School Committee. Will they show the state they’re serious about solving a problem, or just eager to make it go away?
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