Football Coaching Candidate Says Race, Age Reasons He Didn’t Get Job

But that was the case when Fostoria’s first choice, Jason Lynch, resigned shortly after being approved by the Board of Education, and the district was forced to choose again, this time selecting Lakota Athletic Director Jim Kelly.

Kelly accepted the position May 24 after receiving a phone call from Aaron Weidner, Fostoria’s athletic director.

However, another finalist for the job, George Tucker, has filed legal action with the Ohio Civil Rights Commission claiming he was passed over because of his age and his race.

“I have no other thing to base it on,” Tucker said. “It’s not for something in my past or because I don’t have the experience or knowledge, and it’s not that I’m not a community member.”

Tucker, who is black and age 50, said he sees problems with how the hiring process was handled and received no answers when he approached school administrators for a reason why he wasn’t chosen. Kelly, 39, is also black.

“For some reason, I’m always constantly being denied the opportunity to work and also to be the head coach at the school,” Tucker said. “I was raised here “¦ Why do I have to go and seek other action just to get (administrators) to sit down and talk to me?”

Tucker, whose parents moved to Fostoria from North Carolina when he was three, excelled at football, basketball and baseball before graduating from Fostoria High School and going on to play football while earning his bachelor’s degree in special education intervention at the University of Findlay.

He worked in the Fostoria district as part of the Keystone Alternative Program beginning in 1995 until that program ended in 2003, and Tucker said he’s been trying to rejoin the local school system ever since, but has been rejected for positions for “one reason after another.”

After an unsuccessful attempt to become head football coach when the district chose Beau Carmon to lead the team three years ago, Tucker was thrilled to learn he’d have another shot at the job when Carmon resigned in March. He wrote a letter of interest to Tom Grine, Fostoria’s principal and former head football coach, and interviewed for the position with the eight-member hiring committee on April 23.

Tucker said he stayed in touch with several members of the committee, and also with Weidner, throughout the process. Text messages exchanged with Weidner indicate he told Tucker on May 14 that Lynch was the more-qualified candidate. Tucker, however, claims Weidner told him during a resulting telephone conversation that, “if it’s any consolation, you can consider yourself runner-up.”

In text messages on May 24, Weidner told Tucker the committee had voted for Kelly. Tucker responded with messages to Grine, Weidner and another member asking what led them to chose Kelly, and also with a May 25 e-mail to those three members and Superintendent Steven Pritts asking to meet and discuss the issue.

“That’s the last form of communication I heard from them,” Tucker said. “Aaron stopped talking to me. I sent e-mails. No one would respond to them.

“I followed the chain of command “¦ and I got no result. I got no answer.”

Although he was already questioning the reasons for selecting Lynch, and later Kelly, Tucker said it was the lack of response and acknowledgement from Weidner, Grine and Pritts that led him to first speak with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and later file legal action with the OCRC.

His own motivation, however, remains the same.

Tucker said his goal is still to sit down with those who hired the coaches to gain a better understanding of why he was passed over.

“I want to make it clear to everybody, our objective is to be able to sit down in a meeting and have a list of questions, and these guys need to be able to answer and give me some type of answers that justify why they made the decisions that they did. Why was this matter handled the way it was?”

Pritts said in an e-mail he is unable to comment on Tucker’s claims due to the issue’s status as an ongoing legal matter.

Attorneys representing the school district could not be reached, and Weidner, Grine and Board of Education President Sharon Stannard did not return phone messages seeking comment. Stannard was reportedly unavailable this week.

An OCRC representative looking into Tucker’s claims did not return phone messages, and a policy on the organization’s website states it does not release information while cases are being investigated.

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