‘The girl who canceled football’

The bus incident halted the 2021 Bacon Academy football season. At the time, then-superintendent Jeffrey Burt said the decision to cancel the season was not punitive but due to a lack of coaching staff after the district placed coaches on paid administrative leave for the duration of the Title IX investigation.

The plaintiff’s father, Brian Hurlock, said that his daughter, who was identified by name as the complainant in the Title IX investigation, became known as the girl who canceled football.

Hurlock said she was socially isolated, glared at and harassed by her peers.

“The whole school knew,” Hurlock said. “They labeled her as a rat.”

Hurlock said the school agreed to remove his daughter from the classroom and paid for a remote tutor. He described her lessons as taking place in a “closet in the library” — an isolating and emotionally damaging experience to which she refuses to return .

Meanwhile, Hurlock said the male students responsible for the incident carried on with life as usual.

“This lawsuit gives her the chance to hold the young men accountable in a way that the school district didn’t, and to have her bravery be heard and realized, instead of penalized and shunned,” the Hurlocks’ lawyer, Randi Calabrese, said.

“Every lawsuit like this — every girl or woman who is willing to speak up — presents an opportunity to change the tolerance of this type of behavior. Long gone should be the days when ‘boys will be boys’ can be used to justify the behavior that was so boldly engaged in that day on the bus by those male football players in front of several adults, peers, and even a camera.”