Hundreds Protest Slur-Spewing Coatesville Administrators
The fallout hasn’t stopped from the two Coatesville school administrators who used racial and sexual slurs in texts with each other. Hundreds of people showed at the Coatesville school board meeting Tuesday night to demand the two men be fired—instead of accepting their resignations—and that they be denied their pensions. According to reports, school board members said they accepted the resignations in order to clean house quickly, and that they don’t have any control over the pension disbursement. (Only one of the men, former Superintendent Richard Como, was eligible for his pension anyway.)
Dissatisfied, speaker after speaker, they demanded the board to fire Como and Donato. When board members voted to allow Como and Donato to resign, the parents we spoke to were outraged.
Mikeysa Wilson of Coatesville said, “I don’t have anything to say anymore, they should have fired them.”
Claire Bessick of Coatesville added, “They should be fired, they did wrong, you do wrong on your job, don’t you get fired?”
Board members did not comment following the meeting but hours before the vote, they explained that Como and Donato, as public officials, cannot be terminated without due process. They went onto say that in their view, the best solution was to allow the two to resign and in doing so, not waste tax dollars on legal costs and put the focus back on students.
The West Chester Daily Local News adds:
Before the board members had the chance to vote on the resignations, two whistleblowers revealed themselves in front of the crowd, drawing a roaring applause. Acting Assistant Superintendent Teresa Powell and Director of Technology Abdallah Hawa took the podium to announce that they were the sources who had provided the Daily Local News with the controversial text message transcripts that were published Sunday.
“I am a single parent with three young children here in Coatesville, and they depend on me to take care of them. So I have had to wrestle with whether or not I was going to come up and speak to you about the truth,” Powell said. “I said a few minutes ago that a little integrity is better than any career, because I absolutely love my job, but I love being a person with integrity even more.”
