Ex-schools official guilty of groping teen’s foot

WARWICK – A jury has found a former Providence schools administrator guilty of simple assault for removing a 15-year-old’s sneaker in a Warwick gym and massaging the teen’s foot without his consent.

A Superior Court jury last week convicted Olayinka Alege, 42, in the April 20, 2021, encounter with the East Greenwich teenager at The Edge Fitness Club in Warwick.

District Court Judge Anthony Capraro previously found Alege guilty and issued a one-year filing in the case, meaning the case will be removed from Alege’s record in a year as long as he obeys the law. He was ordered not to contact the teenager or his family.

Alege, now of Riverview, Florida, appealed that ruling to Superior Court, where Judge Luis Matos presided over the jury trial. Sentencing is set for Jan. 26.

Brian Hodge and Timothy Rondeau, spokesmen for Attorney General Peter F. Neronha’s office, did not respond to repeated email and phone inquiries this week for comment on the case.

In court, the teenager testified he finished a round of leg raises at the gym, only to have a man he had never seen before scoot “uncomfortably” close to him.

The man, whom he later learned was Alege, questioned him about his lowtop Converse sneakers and asked to see his shoes. The casual conversation morphed into something “weird,” he later told his father.

He described Alege grabbing his foot

Olayinka Alege outside court on May 13.

and removing the shoe without asking before massaging his right foot up and down with both hands.

Alege accused of toe ‘popping’

Alege was hired in Providence in June 2020 to work with middle school and high school principals as a districtlevel administrator. He came from the public school district in Hillsborough County, Florida, the same area where then-Superintendent Harrison Peters moved from.

In 2009, an Orlando newspaper reported that Alege, an assistant principal at a high school, had been accused of “popping” boys’ toes as a form of discipline.

Five boys told sheriff’s deputies Alege had “asked them on numerous occasions to take off a shoe and sock behind closed doors, and allow him to ‘pop’ their toes,” the Sun-Sentinel reported.

Alege, formerly of West Warwick, resigned his Providence schools post after his arrest by Warwick police.