The Tamaqua Area School Board approved the expulsion of an 11th-grade student at Tuesday night’s school board meeting.

Following an executive session, Nicholas Boyle, chairman of the hearing committee, said the expulsion was for “violation of the discipline code, code of conduct and hazing policy, according to the established criteria.”

The expulsion comes nearly a week after multiple students were suspended following the incident which caused Tamaqua to forfeit its District 11 Class 3A football semifinal game against North Schuylkill 11 days ago. The district refers to the incident as “hazing.”

“I can assure all of you here that the punishment will fit the offenses with regard to how things are going to fold out of this latest incident,” added Larry Wittig, school board president.

Parent speaks out

The father of the victim addressed the audience during the public comment portion of the meeting.

“I will tell everybody in this room right now, from the time I reported this incident, I had nothing but support and absolute transparency flowing from that school board as to what is occurring,” he said.

According to Wittig, the incident happened on Nov. 4 around 6:30 p.m., and by 11 p.m. that night, there was a meeting between police, administration and the parents.

“I understand there are people in this room frustrated with things that they don’t feel were handled correctly before. I get that,” added the father of the victim.

Other public participants voiced their displeasure with the school’s bullying policies and how other alleged circumstances and occurrences were handled in the past.

Rumors, speculation and accusations have swirled over social media across the past two weeks regarding the Nov. 4 incident.

But on Tuesday, the father pleaded for everyone to “slow down.”

“I trust this borough police department, I trust this school board, I trust these administrators,” the father said.

“The lines of communication have been open … people are doing their jobs, and they’re going to make sure this isn’t swept under the rug, and the kids responsible are held accountable.”

The father of the victim said he does not doubt the safety of his child in the school and that he had conversations with the football coaches, who are “just as distraught as anybody else in this room that this happened here.”

“There is no cover-up going on,” the victim’s father said.

“We are born in this country with certain rights, and you have those rights whether you are the victim, whether you’re a suspect or whether you’re a person of interest - you infringe upon them, you lose things. Slow down - it’s not being swept under the rug. It’s being dealt with properly and that’s all I can ask.”

Hearings regarding the incident are ongoing. The school board announced it will hold a special meeting on Monday at 7:30 p.m.

Location confirmed

During the meeting, Wittig confirmed that the incident occurred at the field house (also known as the football house).

“The (football) staff, in this particular circumstance, was not expected to be on site there,” said Wittig.

“Typically, the football team has a dinner, Thursday night, before a Friday night game. It is in the cafeteria, an adjacent building here, and typically some players leave their personal belongings in the house to be retrieved after the dinner and then go on their way home.”

“The staff, they are the last ones to leave the house to go to the dinner, so all of the kids go to the football house (or field house) after practice. Then they come over (to the cafeteria) for the dinner,” Wittig explained.

Wittig said the football staff “gives out awards and those kinds of ceremonies and such” at a Thursday dinner.

“One by one, the students leave, and once they leave, they’re on their way home,” Wittig said. “Those that may go back to the house to retrieve their personal articles - it’s not one of those things where you have a coach walking with every individual student down to that house and that’s when the incident occurred.”

Tamaqua police said the investigation is ongoing.

“We are dealing with it judiciously, expeditiously, and there will be justice according to the procedures set out by the department, by the Tamaqua school district and there is a legal perspective of this that we’re not able to share with anybody,” Wittig said. “But trust me when I say it will be taken to the ‘nth’ degree - as far as we can go.”

Field house?

Members of the audience questioned the purpose or need of the football team’s field house.

Size of lockers in the school building and space for equipment were cited as a few reasons from the board. Superintendent Ray Kinder said gym lockers (in the school building) are used during the day by students who take physical education classes.

“We open it (the field house) at the beginning of the school day, so that people can drop their equipment off there,” Kinder said.

“Again, helmets and shoulder pads do not fit into our lockers. We tell them to take their stuff home all of the time so they can wash it. … When kids are going to practice, it then gets opened up for them at the end of the day. There are a number of coaches on the team, some are able to be there early, others can stay later.”

Kinder said the field house is “locked a vast majority of the time when no one is in there.”

“We’d be foolish if we didn’t examine every one of our policies, procedures and all those types of things to see if we could do better. That’s our responsibility whenever anything happens,” Kinder added.

“We try to be proactive, but when we aren’t able to see something coming, or didn’t see something coming - to react to it then and try to make the situation better or eliminate it as a possibility in the future. We’ll be looking at all of those types of things.”