Word is streaking around town that John Cohn’s next stop will be Tuesday night at the first meeting of the just realigned School Board.
Having been forewarned, I hope the new Board members, Kathy Paspalis, Patricia Siever and Karlo Silbiger, ponder the structure of this case and will be prepared to respond.
This development will make the leaders of Culver City High School cringe.
They want this widening story to go away.
To their considerable disappointment, it is trending, with momentum, in the opposite direction.
The pot-stirring story might have wilted much earlier if school officials had been forthcoming, it seems to me.
To say the other side knows the real reason and you can’t reveal it is a fan-flaming position.
The school could not be more explicit about why senior Maya Cohn no longer is on the girls soccer team, said the principal, because of a confidentiality policy.
In a group interview yesterday at the high school, Principal Pam Magee said there was more to the story than has been reported in this newspaper this week. She indicated that the student’s family knew the rest of the story, and that it was up to the Cohns to disclose the unrevealed details because the school was governed by the confidentiality policy.
A Helpful Policy
“That statement very neatly gets the school off the hook, doesn’t it?” said a hugely suspicious lawyer this afternoon after she read the latest story on the case.
Having employed such a claim at judicious times in her career, she said that whether or not it is policy, “confidentiality is a wonderfully handy tool in your kit because it always is there when you need it. The other side has no place to go.”
Mr. Cohn, meanwhile, is battling hard for his daughter and her suddenly vanished spot on the girls soccer team at Culver High.
After playing for the last two years, Maya Cohn was abruptly dropped just before Thanksgiving. Mr. Cohn said the coach told him his daughter’s commitment to the YMCA program Youth and Governance would make it impossible for her to commit as fully as he requires for the soccer team.
Mr. Cohn is mystified because his daughter belonged to the same off-campus organization the last two years while playing for the same coach.
It was not disqualifying then.
What has changed? That will be one of Mr. Cohn’s questions.
The school, emphatically, is not saying – beyond the principal’s tantalizing observations.
