A basketball player who came out as gay and was subsequently omitted from his team’s yearbook page doesn’t believe the school’s claim they simply made a mistake.
Dalton Maldonado is a star high school point guard who was outed and harassed by members of a rival school’s basketball team – only to have his own school administrators try to hide the attacks, he says. He also says he was “devastated” when he got his senior yearbook and opened it up to his team’s page – only to find himself omitted from the double-page spread.
Outsports, which has published several stories about Dalton, first reported the news he was excluded from his team’s yearbook page.
NCRM reached out to Cassandra Akers, Dalton’s principal at Betsy Layne High School in Kentucky. She had been a basketball player at the school when she was a student, so hopefully she would understand how Dalton was feeling.
But the response to our email was from Dr. Henry L. Webb, Superintendent of the Floyd County Board of Education.
Dr. Webb writes, “the assertion there was a deliberate attempt to harass the student athlete by omitting his photograph from the yearbook, that claim is totally false and without merit,” and calls the omissions “unintentional errors.” He says that “several different individuals” were involved in reviewing the yearbook, yet “the omission was not found.” And Dr. Webb says the school will republish the pages with Dalton in them as inserts students can request later, adding, “we apologize to him and his family for the error.”
Dalton, however, doesn’t appear to buy Dr. Webb’s explanation of what happened.
Yesterday on Facebook Dalton wrote, “after receiving many good wishes and lots of support from all over the country, I received a call from the superintendent of schools. He told me that I was in the annual fifteen times, and that they may have over looked my senior basketball picture. He went on to say that they were going to make a new annual and he hoped I knew they were so proud of me.”
Dalton adds, “here is the picture [above] that should have been in the yearbook, along with the rest of the senior basketball players!,” and he says his school administrators “took Outsports’ first article about my experience and swept it under the rug, as if the harassment and humiliation never happened!”
“I refuse to let this happen again!,” Dalton writes. “I was a senior point guard who had played for three years, and I was even in the center of the team picture. I don’t care if I was in other parts 100 times, my individual picture wasn’t in there! I find it unbelievable that their ‘investigation’ took less than one whole school day and once again they’re just letting it go! I will not stop fighting this. No one deserves this, and I’ll make sure no other LGBT teen in Floyd Co has to face this type of discrimination!”
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Image via Facebook