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Afternoon Open Thread: Steubenville Football Coach Gets Two-Year Contract Extension

Steubenville HS football coach Reno Saccoccia
Steubenville HS football coach Reno Saccoccia

Hey, no big deal right? All he did was cover up a couple of rapes committed by his players… /s

From The Atlantic Wire:

Despite allegations that he knew about a rape and tried to protect his players who committed it, despite widespread criticism that he didn’t punish his team enough and that he should be fired, and despite a grand jury that could charge him looming next week, the powerful Steubenville High football coach Reno Saccocia has been approved for a two-year administrative contract, the city superintendent confirmed to The Atlantic Wire Monday afternoon.

The Ohio Valley’s Herald Star newspaper reported on the Steubenville school board’s minutes over the weekend in an article that included a single phrase about the coach’s new deal:

Two-year administrative contracts for Charles Kokiko, administrator; Bryan Mills, assistant middle school principal; Reno Saccoccia, director of administrative services; Joseph Yanok, middle school principal; Melinda Young, director of programs; and Sara Elliot, school psychologist.

In a phone interview with the Wire, Steubenville schools superintendent Mike McVey described the administrative services position as a “board approved two-year-administrative contract in his current position” that was up for renewal. “Coaching contracts are different from teaching and administrative contracts,” McVey said, stressing that the teaching title was “supplemental” to Saccoccia’s coaching contract.

Nonetheless, the school board’s approval will keep Saccoccia at the school — and it signals a vote of confidence in perhaps the most influential man in the fading steel town that was consumed by the social media response to a case in which two of Saccoccia’s players were convicted in juvenile court of raping an unconscious 16-year-old girl at after parties for a pre-season game by the powerhouse Big Red football team. A grand jury hearing into possible additional charges relating to the parties and their aftermath is now scheduled to convene on April 30.

Why am I not surprised?

Comments

39 responses to “Afternoon Open Thread: Steubenville Football Coach Gets Two-Year Contract Extension”

  1. bostonboomer Avatar
    bostonboomer

    I see that JJ posted this piece from Salon on the previous thread

    For those who don’t remember Soccocia, he is the football coach who, according to text messages and witness testimony at the Steubenville rape trial, knew about the rape of a 16-year-old girl by two of his players but didn’t report the crime to school administrators or law enforcement officials, as he is obligated to do under Ohio law.

    The day after Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond raped an unconscious teenage girl, Mays texted a friend: “I got Reno. He took care of it and shit ain’t gonna happen, even if they did take it to court. Like he was joking about it so I’m not worried,” according to an agent with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation who testified in the case. In addition to the text message, Soccocia was criticized for failing to discipline players involved in circulating the photos of the unconscious victim until eight games into a 10-game season.

  2. bostonboomer Avatar
    bostonboomer

    Goldman Sachs: Deficit Will Plunge Over Next 3 Years

    They say austerity is a drag on the economy. NOW will Obama listen?

    1. dakinikat Avatar

      no. Austerity is the new religion and religious zealots never listen to reason or evidence.

      1. RalphB Avatar
        RalphB

        Crazee doesn’t die!

  3. bostonboomer Avatar
    bostonboomer

    Moving this up from Dakinikat’s comments on the previous thread:

    Breaking News Breaking News ‏@BreakingNews 18m

    Canadian police charge 2 with plot to carry out attack on passenger train between Toronto and New York – @CBCNews http://bit.ly/ZEm5ok

    1. RalphB Avatar
      RalphB

      Are they allowed to do that? They have no 2nd amendment. Good for Canada!

      1. dakinikat Avatar

        well, our second amendment was put in the constitution for entirely different reasons than the NRA states but then Scalia changed it to their interpretation so …

    2. bostonboomer Avatar
      bostonboomer

      This actually sounds like one of the FBI’s pre-crime arrests–no evidence of al Qaeda link given, no evidence of plot, and the public “was never in danger.”

      http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/world/americas/2-arrested-in-plot-to-attack-passenger-train-canada-says.html

      1. RalphB Avatar
        RalphB

        When I read the original link, that’s what occurred to me. Though it’s good to stop this stuff in the planning stages.

      2. bostonboomer Avatar
        bostonboomer

        It’s also good to have evidence, and I’d like to find out if it was a sting or an actual plot initiated by those arrested.

  4. dakinikat Avatar

    Richie Havens died … my boyfriend that died a few years ago used to drum for him

    richie and herman

    Herman is the one in the very back and of course Richie is on the right … this is off the album cover for Mirage … it’s the inner sleeve picture

    1. bostonboomer Avatar
      bostonboomer

      I just came over to post that. Here’s a link.

      http://www.jambase.com/Articles/118431/Richie-Havens-Dies-at-Age-72

      1. bostonboomer Avatar
        bostonboomer

      2. RalphB Avatar
        RalphB

        Doing a little Dylan.

    2. Fannie Avatar
      Fannie

      As you say dak………kewl……………………I have tried to find my 8×10 of Richie, and a brief interview in 1971, when he was doing “Here Comes the Sun”…………..can’t find his album either, but do have Woodstock. He was a good man, R.I.P.

    3. JJ Lopez Minkoff Avatar

      You know, Quentin Tarantino uses his song Freedom in Django Unchained. You should write a book Kat, what interesting people you have had in your life.

      1. dakinikat Avatar

        You would be surprised who I have spent time with and what I have done since living in New Orleans …

        1. JJ Lopez Minkoff Avatar

          You should write a book, for serious.

          My aunt is going to some Jazz festival in Lafayette this week, I forget the name….she asked my mom today if you would be going. She remembered that you live in New Orleans and are a musician.

          1. dakinikat Avatar

            Festivale Louisianne … and I am not going … headed to Seattle shortly so I am saving up for a run to The Closet. Mama needs new shoes.

      2. Mona (aka Wonk the Vote) Avatar

        Book by Dakinikat, yes pls!

    1. ecocatwoman Avatar

      Yes, why not privatize ALL health insurance? (snark) At least they didn’t dump them out of planes without parachutes, but then how would we ever know.

      1. roofingbird Avatar

        I know, what. If LA decides to join, it would probalby mean this is a fair sized problem.

    2. RalphB Avatar
      RalphB

      Damn that’s terrible. Probably happening though since it’s only a modification of patient dumping between emergency rooms which happens most places private and public facilities exist. That’s illegal but quite common.

      1. roofingbird Avatar

        Yep, that happened to my daughter in the middle of an ovarian cyst rupture. Though it was public to public. Oakland left her in the hall and then transfered her to San Mateo were we lived at the time. We never knew anything till her boyfriend at the time called us. She almost died cause she was bleeding out.

      2. bostonboomer Avatar
        bostonboomer

        Sounds like NYC’s policy of dumping homeless people in New Jersey.

      3. roofingbird Avatar

        Why are they getting away with this?

      4. bostonboomer Avatar
        bostonboomer

        Frankly, I have more sympathy for the patients than the hospitals.

      5. RalphB Avatar
        RalphB

        I’m not concerned about the hospitals. The situation here is that Travis County has a publicly funded hospital system and there are also private hospitals. County taxpayers pay for the public hospitals which is fine. The problem comes from our surrounding counties who seem to always put their citizens who can’t pay into the Travis County system and don’t pay it.

        We would like a Hospital District. including the surrounding counties, but those voters keep turning it down because it would mean a tax increase for them. Those tea partiers want the service and they want someone else to pay for it. FreeeeDUUMMMBBB!

  5. bostonboomer Avatar
    bostonboomer
    1. bostonboomer Avatar
      bostonboomer

      Now this is interesting: The Strongest Evidence Yet That The Austerity Movement Has Suffered A Huge Blow

      AEI’s Jim Pethokoukis observes the fallout from Reinhart and Rogoff’s Excel error appears to have officially jumped from the digital to the real.

      Stanford economist John Taylor reports that the G20 appears to be abandoning specific fiscal and monetary goals:

      A participant in last Friday’s G20 meetings told me that the error was a factor in the decision to omit specific deficit or debt-to-GDP targets in the G20 communique.
      The error refers to Reinhart and Rogoff’s leaving out data that would have shown high debt-to-GDP levels actually don’t produce that great an impact on growth.

      Taylor argues the error does not affect the over all lesson of Reinhart and Rogoff — that large debt loads are bad, but still, this is hard evidence that the austerity movement is crumbling.

      1. ecocatwoman Avatar

        Couldn’t happen to a “nicer” movement now, could it? I sure Mittens has had time to get his car elevator installed before his profits drop an itsy bit.

      2. dakinikat Avatar

        well at least the G20 is coming around, but it might be because the Germany economy is headed for a recession since they killed their customers’ economies

    2. RalphB Avatar
      RalphB

      In the last week or two, IBM has dropped >$25/share to $187 largely on the basis of a “disappointing” 1st quarter. Allow me to translate, business in EMEA now really sucks the big one.

  6. RalphB Avatar
    RalphB

    Chris Hayes just asked every question that we would like answered on the West plant explosion and said they were going to find and answer all of them over the course of this week or so. That could be a small revelation.

    1. bostonboomer Avatar
      bostonboomer

      Great! I missed his show.

      1. RalphB Avatar
        RalphB

        Hopefully over the course of this week he won’t be distracted by some new shiny thing.

  7. RalphB Avatar
    RalphB

    StateImpact Texas: After West Fertilizer Explosion, Concerns Over Safety, Regulation and Zoning

    Lots of information in this article about the West explosion and other pertinent issues.

  8. Mona (aka Wonk the Vote) Avatar

    Wish there was a ‘dislike but thank you for reporting’ button