Parents accused a member of the West Orange-Cove school board of posting on Facebook during the weekend that the Fillies dance team looked like they were “dancing for tips” during the halftime performance Friday night.
However, board member John Gray told KOGT in a written comment through the school district “My original statement was made in general and did not mention the Fillies organization or the Director.”
Parents of Fillies dance team members went to a regularly scheduled school board meeting Monday evening to ask for an apology.
“I think it was extremely inappropriate and irresponsible to infer that their performance was an attempt to dance for tips,” said Bonnie Moses, the mother of teacher and drill team sponsor Dylan Moses Bennett.
She said the board member is a professional dance instructor and his “suggestions and critique” would have been welcomed in private. But social media for everyone to see is not the place for such comments.
Gray, who was elected in May, erased the questioned comment from his Facebook. He made an apology that reads “I never meant to downgrade the children. And I can understand how my words could be taken that way. And it is with my apologies that I extend for an apparent mistake on my part.”
Parent Thomas Conway said “I did take offense to the comment that it (the performance) looked like they were performing for tips. I didn’t see anything degrading or less than ladylike.”
Eric Guillory said he was asked to give some background about the drill team. He said the Fillies had shrunk to the point where the group was close to being disbanded because the kids did not want to do the drills. Three years ago, his niece had to recruit younger students to be on the drill team.
“They don’t want to dance country style,” he said. The school has changed during the past 30 years and the kids don’t want to be in the band and drill team, he said.
The students “want to be like Beyonce. They want to do what they see on TV like the other schools with a majority African-American schools do.”
Moses said her daughter, the drill team sponsor, was hired as a mass communications teacher at West Orange-Stark High School and volunteered to coach the drill team this year after she was asked.
Guillory said he has heard girls in town excited this summer about being in the drill team.
Also during the citizen comments section, John Smith said he had been asked to speak by a parent who is concerned about how coaches speak to the children. He said the parent has heard coaches using abusive language with profanities. “They (coaches) should have a code of ethics,” he said. If children can’t do something like curse, “we feel like (coaches) shouldn’t.”
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