Elida football coach suspended

ELIDA — An Elida coach and teacher at the center of a recent controversy has been suspended for a separate incident.

Football coach Jason Carpenter was suspended Wednesday without pay for five days for acting in an “inappropriate and unprofessional manner toward a student by engaging the student in horseplay in your classroom,” according to a suspension notice in his personnel file.

“This type of conduct is never appropriate when dealing with students,” the notice continued.

The suspension will begin Monday. Carpenter was not scheduled to work today or Friday.

Superintendent Don Diglia declined to comment further on specifics of the incident or rumors that Carpenter kicked a student. The incident involved a 15-year-old male freshman. He was not injured.

“I do not believe that there was any malice or intent to harm the young man,” Diglia said. “He did not do it to hurt him.”

Carpenter could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

The incident happened Jan. 9, but was not reported to high school Principal Sarah Burden until earlier last week. Burden has been looking into it since. Rumors that Carpenter told students to not say anything and he would fix the student's math score are not true, Diglia said.

Carpenter had previously been accused of making an inappropriate gesture and comment to another student, one of those involved in the 2010 robbery of a pizza deliveryman. The student's mother said that while the student was face down stretching in the weight room, Carpenter straddled him, made a humping motion and asked if “this is what big Bubba did” to him while in the juvenile detention center.

The school and Allen County Sheriff's Office both concluded there were no grounds to the accusations. The issue brought a crowd of people to last month's school board meeting.

Diglia said the two incidents are separate and the suspension is solely based on the most recent.

“I looked into the other incident and made the decision based on the information I had,” Diglia said. “I looked into this incident and I made the decision based on the information I had.”

Carpenter has been a math teacher and coach at Elida for four years. There were no other discipline notices in his personnel file.