NOTE: This post was originally written in July, 2026, before additional news broke about charges in this case.
A boy went to football practice at Cheltenham High on September 3. He came home and went straight to his room and did not want to talk. Four days later his mother took him to the doctor, because he had told her his teammates jumped him in the locker room and hurt him. Later that month, police told his mother the teammates had used a broomstick. His lawyers call it attempted sexual assault. He was fifteen years old.
Nearly twenty of his teammates watched. Some filmed it. Some participated. Three of the coaches called him that same night — and told him not to tell his parents.
Eleven months later, no student had been disciplined. No charges had been filed.* The Title IX investigation is still “ongoing.” No one from the school ever called to ask his mother how her son was doing. The mother is considering a lawsuit. The boy switched to virtual school, is isolated, and does not want to go outside anymore because kids at the local basketball court taunt him.
This is written for every principal, every superintendent, every athletic director, every coach, every teacher, and every board member reading this from anywhere in this country. Cheltenham is where it happened. It is not where it will stop happening. Every one of us with the keys to a building where children are entrusted to us has a job to do — to keep them safe physically, mentally, emotionally, intellectually, and culturally. All of it. We all have to learn from this. And we all have to change something next Monday morning.
The district’s own external review — completed in January— found insufficient supervision in the locker room, a failure by the coaching staff and adult volunteers to prioritize student safety, and a toxic and negative culture inside the program. Players had received no anti-bullying or anti-hazing education. Nineteen students watched an assault and none of them stopped it. Some of them filmed it. That did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in a building that adults ran.
The head coach and another coach have since been separated from the district. That is the barest floor. The staff who called that boy that night and told him to keep it quiet were not coaching football. They were obstructing. And they were doing it inside a public school, to a fifteen-year-old, on the same night his body had been assaulted.
What Are Our Boys and Men Learning?
Mama Fasaha Traylor asked an important question this week, on a Facebook post about this case:
What is wrong with people in this country? Where do they get these ideas from? Epstein’s pals? Abu Ghraib in Iraq? And the coaches — where did they get the idea to tell an abused child not to tell his parents?!
She named the register. A locked room. An assaulted child. Bystanders with phones. Ringleaders. A cover-up by the adults on the back end. That is not a subculture teenage boys invented in the dark. It is a script grown men have been running for a long time, in prisons, in fraternities, in military police units, in the private jets and private islands of the well-connected. The boys did not conjure it. They copied it. And the men who called that child that night to tell him to hush were not shocked bystanders scrambling for a playbook. They were reaching for one they already knew.
And note who did not do this. It was not the children this country has spent the last several years legislating against — not the children reading books the governors wanted pulled. Not the teachers teaching truth. It was teammates in a public school football locker room, with grown coaches on the cleanup crew. Every panic the state has been selling us about which children are the danger picked the wrong children. It always does. The danger, again, was the grown men in the room and the grown men on the phone.
The season got canceled. Then the next season got canceled. The community has spent a year fighting about football. The child at the center of this has spent a year alone.
Justice delayed is justice denied
Frederick Douglass said it. Dr. King quoted it from a Birmingham jail cell. It was true of every case they were talking about, and it is true of this one.
When a fifteen-year-old is assaulted in a school building and eleven months later no adult in that building has been held to account, no student who watched or filmed has been disciplined, and no one from the school has called the child’s mother to ask how her son is doing — that is not caution. That is not “letting the process work.” That is a school system choosing its own comfort over a child.
The superintendent has said the district is not commenting because the district attorney’s office asked school officials not to comment. That is not the same as being unable to act. The DA controls charges. The DA does not control whether a principal walks the halls of that building and names, out loud, what happened there and what the school owes the child it failed. The DA does not control whether the school calls the mother. The DA does not control whether the students who filmed an assault ever have to sit down with an adult and answer for it. Those are school decisions. Adults in that building are making them, or not making them, every day this drags on.
To every principal, every AP, every dean, every athletic director, every coach reading this:
You do not need an external investigator to call a mother whose child was hurt in your building. You do not need a completed Title IX report to walk into that locker room and change the culture that produced twenty bystanders and zero interveners. You do not need the DA’s permission to sit down with the child, look him in the eye, and say the school failed him — and mean it. You do not need a lawyer’s clearance to discipline students who filmed an assault on their own phones and passed the video around. And you should not need a consultant’s recommendation to end the practice of coaches calling children at night and telling them not to tell their parents.
Those are not Title IX decisions. Those are principal decisions. Those are moral decisions. They belong to the adults with the keys to the building. And the failure to make them, month after month, is its own decision.
There is a leadership tradition among the effective principals who mentored many of us that says the first accountability of a principal is not upward — not to the superintendent, not to the school board, not to the lawyers, not to the athletic conference. The first accountability is to the child, to the family, to the staff you serve. Everybody else is second.
We Should Accountable to the Community
Community-based accountability would have looked like this. The morning after the assault was reported, the principal calls the mother, right after ChildLine, before the external investigator, before the press release. Not to protect the district. To love on the child and his family. To say: your son was hurt in our building on our watch and we are sorry, and this is what we are doing today, and this is what we are doing tomorrow, and this is my cell phone number.
Collective responsibility and accountability would have looked like every coach who called that boy that night being off the field and out of contact with children by the next morning, pending everything else. Not because a Title IX finding said so. Because a principal knew what those calls were.
Accountability would have looked like the twenty students who watched, and the ones who filmed, being called in — with their families, with counselors, with clear expectations — long before a lawyer got involved. Not to punish for the sake of punishing. To teach. To make plain that a bystander in a locker room in your school is not a bystander. A bystander is a participant. That is a lesson worth teaching a fifteen-year-old, and it should not take eleven months and a canceled season for the school to teach it. To teach that being an upstander is the expectation – especially for those who represent our school community publicly.
Accountability would have looked like the child himself getting a home visit, a counselor, a re-entry plan (if the family desired), a mentor, a phone call every week from an adult in that building whose only job on that call was to ask how he was — not to gather information, not to protect the district, not to prep for litigation. To ask.
None of that requires a Title IX investigation. None of it requires the DA. None of it requires the external investigator to file. It requires a principal who understands that the badge on their chest is not from the district, it is from the children.
The football conversation is not the important conversation
The community has been fighting for a year about the football season. Parents are upset at the school board. Recruiters are calling players. Careers are on hold. Those are real losses, and the families raising them are not wrong to raise them. I heard about the football season cancellation. I assumed there was misbehavior and the team was being held accountable. I didn’t look into it. A friend called me and asked me if I heard what was happening. I muttered “yeah, football season was canceled,” When she sighed and said “something much bigger than football.”
Football is not the important conversation. The important conversation is the mother who has to watch her son avoid the basketball court because kids taunt him there. The important conversation is a fifteen-year-old who says he was assaulted more than once, in a building his family trusted, on a team he was proud to be on. The important conversation is what any of the adults in that building have done, in eleven months, to be worthy of the trust that mother handed them on the first day of the season.
If we come out of this year with a rebuilt football program and a child still isolated, still taunted, still avoiding his own neighborhood — with no adult in that building ever having called to ask how he was — the district will have gotten it exactly backwards.
What every principal reading this can do on Monday
Walk your locker rooms. Every one of them. On different days, at different times. Investigate. Do not wait. Ask your athletic director when the last adult check was, and ask them again next week, and the week after that. If your coaching staff does not have a written protocol for adult presence during change-outs and after-practice periods, write one and enforce it by the end of the month.
Talk to your students. Not just the ones who show up in your office. The ones on the teams, in the bathrooms, on the buses, in the back of the room. Ask them what they see. Ask them what they would not tell an adult, and then ask them why not, and take that answer seriously.
Teach bystander (upstander) intervention explicitly, not as an assembly and not as a slide deck. As practice. Role-plays. Real conversations. Nineteen students watching an assault is not a mystery. It is what happens when we don’t teach them enough, out loud, what they owe each other in a locker room.
Fire fast when you have to. There is a version of loyalty to a coach that is really a betrayal of children. The coach who calls a fifteen-year-old at night to tell him not to tell his parents does not get another season. Not while you have the keys.
Call the mother. Call the father. Call the grandmother. When a child is hurt, the school shows up before the lawyers do. That is not risk. That is the job.
The DA will do what the DA does. The Title IX process will do what the Title IX process does. The lawyers will do what lawyers do.
None of that has anything to do with whether the adults inside that school building have been doing their job. And the record so far — eleven months, no discipline, no call to the mother, canceled seasons and canceled seasons and a child who cannot leave his own house — says they have not.
We do not need a title, a letter, or a completed investigation to do the job we took on when we said yes to being principals. We took on the child. We took on the family. We took on the building.
Somebody’s son went to football practice at Cheltenham on September 3 and came home a different child. A year later, the adults with the keys to that building still owe him something. Justice delayed is justice denied, and that debt is not going to be settled by an external investigator, or a district attorney, or a school board vote.
It is going to be settled by whether the grown-ups in that school ever get around to acting like his life matters more than the season did.
A letter that will not say sorry
The superintendent sent a letter to the Cheltenham community, hours after the DA’s press conference. It is worth reading twice — once for what it says, and a second time for what it will not.
It does not open with the child. There is one line about “the victim and their family.” There is no apology. There is no acknowledgment that no one from the district ever picked up the phone to check on the mother in a year. After eleven months, the word sorry still is not in a district letter about a child assaulted twice in a district building.
It reframes eleven months of institutional silence as prudence. “Every report brought to the district’s attention was addressed based on the information available at the time.” The mother has said in print that no one from the school ever contacted her. The letter does not answer her. It talks past her.
It claims credit for the season suspensions and the coaching separations as if the district led those decisions on its own moral steam. It did not. The suspensions, the cancellations, the separations — all of them came under the pressure of a family speaking up, an external investigation, a lawsuit posture, and a grand jury that had to be convened in December to compel testimony under oath. Passive voice does the work of the letter: “decisions were made.” By whom, when, and after what pressure to move — not answered.
It shifts the delay onto other people. “Individuals did not cooperate with the investigative process.” That is a real thing. Grand juries move slowly when witnesses stonewall. But notice what it does here. The letter is telling the community that the reason it took a grand jury and a year is that other people did not cooperate. Not us. Never us. The grand jury saved the day because the grand jury had tools the district did not.
And this is the piece that will not survive the grand jury findings. The DA today described the coaches trading texts trying to cover up what had happened, and called what the coaches themselves labeled “horseplay” what it actually was — crimes. If the coaches were on the cover-up crew, then “individuals did not cooperate with the investigative process” is not a story about other people. It is a story about the people the district employed, hired to be around children, and paid to be the adults in the room. The letter is still refusing to name that. A year in.
It ends on a policy pivot. Expand the child protective services law. Change the hazing statute. Work with State Senator Haywood and State Representative Nelson. All of that is reasonable. Some of it is necessary. But dropped now, in the district’s first statement since charges were filed, it functions as a subject change. It gets the reader thinking about legislation, instead of about the child in his bedroom and the mother still waiting for a phone call.
And the close is boilerplate. “We will continue to review, strengthen, and reinforce our safety protocols.” Every district writes this sentence after every crisis. It commits to nothing anyone can measure. No name of a review lead. No independent monitor. No date. No promise to the mother. No promise to the child.
This is what “downward” accountability sounds like when it has been replaced by upward accountability. The letter is written to lawyers, to the school board, to the insurance carrier, to the state, to the press. The audience is everybody but the family and community the district failed. That is how you can tell.
A principal who understood the badge on their chest was from the children would have written a different letter. That letter would open with the child. It would name what happened to him — twice, now, in that same locker room. It would say the words: we failed you, and this is what we owe you, and this is my cell phone number. It would name the pressure, the delay, the year of silence, and take responsibility for it, not narrate around it. It would not close on Harrisburg. It would close on a promise, in specifics, to that one family. Then it would keep the promise.
An Administrative Failure
The district’s line all year has been that a coaching problem got in the way of an administrative response. The grand jury’s separate report on the district itself says the opposite. The administrators are in the report too. And what they did — and did not do — is raised up.
On September 7, four days after the assault, the mother came to the school. She told the administration her son had been jumped in the locker room. She told them his genitals had been injured. She texted the assistant vice principal.
Three district employees handled it. One of them — Employee #1 in the grand jury report — sent a text to the other two saying, “I THINK I backed her off coming to the building in the AM.” A mother whose fifteen-year-old had been assaulted in that building four days earlier was being managed away from the building by an administrator. Not welcomed in. Not called back. Backed off. Handled.
The same employee sent another text characterizing the child as having “a chip on his shoulder” from not making varsity. That is the frame an administrator reached for on day four — not what happened to that boy, but what is wrong with that boy. Victim-blaming in a text thread on district-issued devices, four days after the assault, before any investigation had been done.
Then — and this is the piece the grand jury flagged as beyond bad judgment — the district put the head coach, Terence Tolbert, inside its own investigation of what happened in his own locker room. Employee #2 called Tolbert that same day, asked him what he knew, and took him at his word. All three employees then “vouched for Tolbert’s credibility” among themselves. Employee #2 later testified he trusted the coaches because he “thought that they would be forthcoming, mature adults and do the right thing and not lie to him.” Employee #3 concluded no coach had told the boy to keep his mouth shut “simply because a coach said it never happened.”
That is the head coach who is now charged with two counts of endangering the welfare of a child and two counts of conspiracy. He was inside the district’s investigation of himself. And the administrators trusted him because they wanted to. A year later Dr. Scriven’s public defense of that decision is that at the time, there was “no reason to believe Coach Tolbert was being untruthful.” There was every reason. There were nineteen witnesses in a locker room he was paid to supervise, a video of a broomstick assault already circulating in the school, and a mother in the building telling them what had happened to her son. The reason to disbelieve him was sitting in the office they had backed her off from.
In the meantime, Employee #2 testified that he did nothing to make sure football players were supervised. The coaches’ office in the locker room — the one their predecessors had used the season before — sat unused. At least five paid Cheltenham football coaches were not up to date on their Act 126 child-abuse clearances, which is not a filing issue, it is a state-law violation about who is allowed near children in a Pennsylvania school building.
And sometime after September 3, an administrator finally called the team together. Not to encourage witnesses to come forward. Not to name what had happened to a teammate. A player later testified that the administrator told them not to fight one another and warned that there would be consequences if “anything else occurred.” The message the team received from the adult in the room was: keep it down, or the season is over.
The district ran three separate investigations over the course of the school year. All three of them missed the August 15 assault entirely. It took a grand jury questioning a player in January 2026 to surface a broomstick video that had been circulating in the school community since August. That is not the district identifying and acting on a hazing culture. It is the district being told by a grand jury, five months later, what had already been in the students’ phones the whole time.
And the assistant vice principal the mother texted on September 7 was named vice principal at another district school on July 20, 2026 — nine days before the charges came down. That is a district personnel decision. It is what upward accountability looks like on paper. Community-based accountability writes a different memo.
The grand jury’s line about all of this is the one every principal in the region should carry into next week: the district’s level of incompetence did not just fail one child. It put every young man on that team at risk. Not one victim. A whole roster of children entrusted to grown men who did not use the office, did not carry the clearances, did not welcome the mother, did not question the coach, and did not find the second assault their own students had filmed and shared. Every one of those boys is somebody’s son too.
Our Children Over Football
The district has spent the last eleven months talking about the season. Season canceled. Season suspended. Season restored. Season under review. Every public statement Cheltenham has made about this case has been organized around football — whether the team plays, when the team plays, which coaches stand on the sideline.
School districts are not in the football business. School districts are in the child-raising business. Every practice field, every locker room, every hallway, every classroom is soil the adults are tending on behalf of children. The season is the calendar the adults keep. The harvest is the child who walks out at eighteen and becomes an adult, a parent, a citizen, a neighbor, an educator. The harvest is who they get to be because of what we grew in them.
Cheltenham had a fifteen-year-old boy in its garden last August. He was assaulted twice. He was silenced by his coaches. His mother was shooed away from the building by an administrator. Three district investigations missed the first assault entirely. The season kept going.
You cannot cancel a season and call that accountability. You cannot restore a season and call that repair. The season was never what the adults were entrusted with. The child was. The children are.
Is Anywhere Safe For Our Children?
It is tortuous to read about a child being tortured in this country — by his peers, and then silenced by the adults — and to remember that this is an American story, not an aberration. Abu Ghraib. Guantánamo. The Korean War. Vietnam. Iraq. Federal Native American boarding schools. Epstein’s island. Prison yards this country runs, and prisons this country funds overseas. Every one of those rooms had adults with power, a stripped person, cameras or witnesses, and a cover on the back end. That is the inheritance the coaches were reaching for when they picked up the phone that night. It is older than football. It is older than Cheltenham. It has been in the water of this country for a long time.
And now it is in a high school locker room, in a place a mother sent her son to be coached, to be built, to be loved on by grown men who told her they would look after him. If a football team is not safe for a fifteen-year-old, and a locker room is not safe, and the phone call home the same night is not safe, then we have to ask the harder question our elders have been asking us all year. Is anywhere safe for our children in this country. And if the answer is no, or not yet, or only sometimes, then all of us — principals, coaches, teachers, parents, neighbors, elders — are going to pay the price for the rooms we did not make safe. The child at Cheltenham already is.
We all have to learn from this. Every one of us. The principals in Philly, the superintendents in Compton, the athletic directors in Little Rock, the coaches in Wilmington, the teachers in Detroit, the board members in Tulsa. Keeping a child safe is not just keeping their body safe. It is keeping their mind, their heart, their intellect, their culture, and their spirit safe too. All of it. Every day. In every room we have the keys to. If Cheltenham teaches us anything, it teaches us that the price of not learning is paid by a child who did not choose to be the lesson.
*Update, August 1, 2026. Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele announced charges this week against ten people — four Cheltenham High School football coaches and six players. The head coach, associate head coach, assistant coach, and a volunteer coach were each charged with two counts of endangering the welfare of a child and two counts of conspiracy. Two players, both eighteen at the time, were charged as adults. Four other players face juvenile charges.
The grand jury uncovered a second, earlier locker-room assault on the same child, on August 15, 2025. In Steele’s words: “The assaults on this victim were not the typical goofing around by teammates or horseplay as some of the coaches in this case called it. They were crimes.” And the grand jury’s separate report on the school district itself found the district’s “level of incompetence didn’t just fail one child — it put every young man on the football team at risk.” This post was written before charges were announced. The message still stands. In some ways it stands harder now.
Additional Update: Dr. Scrivens, Cheltenham’s Superintendent resigned.
