In Wake of Burbank Scandals, Are Worst Revelations Over?

Times Valley Edition reporters Lisa Leff and Darin Esper found a Burbank Unified School District community that seems more than anxious about putting recent scandals behind them. By now, we suspect, you’ve heard all about the particulars, but a brief synopsis is in order.

There was the school’s fund-raiser, a middle-aged woman, who was charged with the alleged seduction of a 17-year-old Burbank High School football player last July. The district’s school board president then resigned amid charges of a cover-up of the incident. Then two coaches were charged for failing to report the same incident as a possible case of child abuse, with one of the coaches accused of making death threats against the other about keeping silent. That just about covers it.

Yes, the term “former” fits suitably before the titles of those who are alleged to have committed these acts, such as former varsity football coach John Hazelton, and former school board President Joe Hooven and the like. And school district supporters are quick to say that the whole matter was a curious aberration, a tale more likely played out in a bad, insomnia-hour cable-television movie rather than in solid and staid Burbank.

Let’s not be so hasty.

Of course, the fund-raiser accused of seducing the student-athlete is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. We would just like to be absolutely sure that the incident, if it occurred, was the only incident of its kind. We haven’t heard enough along those lines.

Next, we find it hard to believe that Burbank voters really elected Joe Hooven to the Burbank School Board on his pledge to improve high school athletics through aggressive recruitment of coaches. Since when was that a logical reason for electing a school board member?

Moreover, an investigator hired by the school district and by the California Interscholastic Federation found that the former board president and the former head coach “may have” used “undue influence” to recruit players.

It sounds to us as though the role of athletics has been curiously warped and corrupted. What else can one conclude when Burbank athletic boosters utter thinly veiled racial and ethnic slurs of the following kind: “You go to places like Valencia or Canyon High . . . and that is where you have the family-oriented communities today where you can build a winning [sports] tradition year after year.”

Translation? The Burbank sports gene pool has changed. Too many Latino students, who prefer soccer to football. The white players, sorely missed, we suppose, are attending schools and putting on the shoulder pads in parts north, where things are supposedly more “family-oriented.”

And at the very least, we had here a school board president who has admitted that he withheld knowledge of a serious allegation involving a Burbank student. “Ethically and morally, I should have reported the incident,” Hooven says.

In the coming months, we will learn more about what happened and what didn’t happen. The book has not been closed here, not by a longshot.

Since when was aggressive recruitment of coaches a logical reason for electing a school board member?