Baseball coach gets reinstated at Bellaire
Move follows probe into culture of team
The Houston ISD board of trustees narrowly voted Thursday to reinstate a Bellaire High School baseball coach who was removed from the position last year following allegations that his players made monkey noises when a Black pitcher on an opposing team took the mound.
The board held a public hearing in the Hattie Mae White Educational Support Center auditorium to address a grievance filed by attorneys representing Nick Ozuna, who had coached the baseball team for nearly two decades until he was reassigned to a teaching position last spring at Milby High School while the district conducted an
investigation.
Following the allegations stemming from the heated game last March, a district investigation found Ozuna allowed a culture of racial insensitivity to persist among players both on the field and in the locker room, said Paul Lamp, an attorney representing the district.
But Christopher Tritico, the coach’s attorney, said the findings in the report were “completely untrue.” Tritico said he thinks the district did not conduct a fair investigation because the investigator approached the case with a “predetermined outcome.” Ozuna did not hear his players making offensive noises during last year’s game but tried to discipline players after learning about the incident, his attorney said.
“It wasn’t anything other than high school kids being high school kids,” Tritico said about last year’s game. “To suggest this is a culture of racism because kids were being kids is not fair.”
Trustees Bridget Wade, Kendall Baker, Sue Deigaard and
Elizabeth Santos voted in favor of reinstating the coach while trustees Dani Hernandez, Patricia Allen and Kathy BluefordDaniels voted against doing so.
Members of the Bellaire community who attended the meeting clad in school colors began clapping and cheering following the vote.
In addition to reinstating the coach, the district will also remove negative findings from Ozuna’s personnel file and state in an open letter that the coach did not commit any racist or discriminatory acts against students at his school or other schools.
Tritico said he hopes the coach will be back on the job by as soon as next week. Ozuna “is extremely excited that he’s finally going to get back to his team,” the attorney said.
Blueford-Daniels, who voted to deny the coach’s grievance, said she cannot support an environment in which children are throwing out racial epithets and telling other kids that they should “continue to cut grass and sell tacos.”
“What they’re doing at school, a lot of them are learning at home. How long do we allow this to go on?” she said. “The children’s behavior is not going to change if the adult behavior is allowing this to continue.”
Santos, who voted in favor of the coach, said the district lacks clear policies surrounding these types of investigations.
“I don’t see where we can uphold the administration’s side when there is no policy to uphold,” she said. “I refuse to remove a community member that supports our children, that orients them in ways they need to be oriented.”
The decision comes about a year after the game against Westbury High School that sparked calls for the Bellaire coach to be fired. Additionally, one Bellaire baseball player said he was singled out by the coach and told to cut his afro, an incident that prompted him to transfer schools.