A high-school principal and other administrators are under fire as photos of a recent event showed male students dressed as females giving lap dances to administrators. The Hazard High School in Hazard, Kentucky, apparently staged what they called a “man pageant” as part of its homecoming celebration this week.
Photos of the event surfaced on social media on Tuesday, showing staff members, including the school principal Donald “Happy” Mobelini receiving lap dances from scantily clad students. Mobelini is also the mayor of Hazard, the city where the incident took place.
Other photos reportedly show teenage girls dressed as Hooters waitresses and teenage boys being paddled.
Sandra Combs, the superintendent of Hazard Independent Schools, said that the district “has a tradition of excellence and academics and everything we do, but the incident is being investigated and once the investigation is complete, appropriate action will be taken.”
In a statement, Combs apologized for the incident: “At the end of the day, the light-hearted activity simply got out of hand, and for that, we apologize. In the future, we will strive to keep the lighthearted, fun nature of school activities without the inappropriate behavior.”
Combs also announced that after an investigation, appropriate disciplinary action would be taken, but declined to discuss what the action would be, calling it a “personnel matter.” She also announced the formation of a “student activity committee” which will review all student-led activities in the future. Combs believes the new committee “should prevent any such skits from being performed in the future.”
The superintendent also announced that all staff would be required to be trained on policy and procedures and social-media training for students.
Many parents were rightfully outraged at the incident. Jenna Smith, a Hazard mother who has a family member at the high school and other children in the district, told Lex18 that the event should have been shut down immediately once administrators realized what was happening.
“I think that they should have at that point said, ‘Hey, I know this is a joke. But let’s stop. This is inappropriate’” said Smith.
“Public education is under so much fire right now. This kind of stuff is not helpful. In fact, it’s disgusting. It appears they are sexualizing young adults,” Nema Brewer, a co-founder of the public education group Ky.120, told the Lexington Herald-Leader.
But Mollie Hill Layne, whose son and friends participated in the event, believed that it was all in good fun and that the photographic evidence was incomplete.
“It has been taken completely out of context,” Layne says. “There are only photos being shown on the internet, no videos. The photos don’t show the teachers pushing the children off of them.”
But it’s not the first time that Mobelini has been accused of lax supervision of children under his charge. Mobelini and two other Hazard High School teachers are accused of improperly supervising a school trip to New York City and Washington, D.C., in 2017. On the trip, one student allegedly raped another.
The alleged rape victim has claimed that Mobelini and the other two chaperones for the trip rarely checked on the students, allowing them to walk unsupervised in the Times Square area of New York, which led to them obtaining alcohol and, ultimately, to the sexual assault of the female student by a male student.
The lawsuit claims that Mobelini and the other chaperones failed to hold the students on the trip “to a strict account for their conduct.” The case is set for trial in August of 2022.
And in 2008, Mobelini was twice investigated for incidents involving students and alcohol. In one instance, photos emerged of the principal driving student around while they allegedly were smoking and drinking alcohol.
Another incident involved police catching students drinking alcohol on the school football field just moments after Mobelini was seen with them. Mobelini was cleared after saying that he wasn’t aware that the children had alcohol.
Mobelini or the other school staff have not yet commented publicly about the homecoming incident.
