Two female basketball coaches who were fired for taking students at a Wyoming junior high school on a hazing expedition are claiming that male teachers have gotten away with a “laundry list” of far worse offenses.

Sheryl Shroefel and Melisa Mahoney do not deny that they deserved to be disciplined for conduct one reader of the Billings Gazette newspaper called “idiocy.” In April 2002, while supervising a sleepover for the girls' basketball team at Centennial Junior High in Casper, they took six students with them to the homes of two male coaches to “pull a prank 'haze.'”

The prank backfired after the male coaches objected to having their lawns, trees and cars decorated with toilet paper, syrup, plastic wrap and tampons.

But in a wrongful termination suit, Shroefel and Mahoney say the discipline they suffered went far beyond what the Natrona County School District has imposed on male teachers for offenses ranging from sexual harassment of students to using school computers to view online porn.

The district “has a pattern and practice of permitting male employees and/or agents to engage in conduct far more egregious than that of Plaintiffs, without imposing any form of discipline,” the complaint alleges.

The coaches' judgment, to put it mildly, was questionable, particularly as the principal at Centennial had specifically instructed them to keep the students on school premises during the sleepover.

“If your child were entrusted to the care of what you believed were responsible adults, how could you condone this escapade?” asked another Billings Gazette reader.

In letters attached to the complaint, however, the Wyoming Department of Employment found merit to the coaches' claims of discrimination, noting that male employees of the district

have engaged in a laundry list of offenses, both less and far more egregious than that of [the coaches], and no one has ever received the same severity of discipline as [the coaches].

The district's “assertion that sex played no part in its decision to discipline [the coaches] does not withstand objective scrutiny,” the department said, and the “evidence unerringly supports a conclusion that [the district] would not have disciplined males in the same manner.”

By Matthew Heller
10/24/06

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Nearly eight months after baseball Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett died without specifying who should get his cremated remains, a Phoenix judge has ordered the executor of his estate to release them to his ex-wife.

“There is no statute or case law in Arizona regarding who is entitled to possession of the remains of a decedent,” Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Benjamin E. Vatz said. But he agreed with Tonya Puckett that the two children she had with Kirby Puckett are entitled to their father's remains.

“That [executor Brian Woods] has elevated his belief in what the Decedent would have wanted over the clear wishes of Decedent’s siblings and the emotional needs and desires of the Children is unreasonable,” Vatz said in his order.

Puckett's ashes have been kept at a Minneapolis funeral home since he died of a stroke in Phoenix in March. Tonya Puckett filed a petition to compel release of the remains after she and her ex-husband's fiancée, Jodi Olson, could not agree over their disposition.

Vatz noted that Woods, who was Puckett's close friend and longtime business advisor, “firmly believes that the Decedent would strongly oppose giving the Petitioner control over his remains in any capacity.”

But in granting Tonya Puckett's petition, Vatz found that Woods' “decision to refuse to release Decedent’s cremated remains to the Children has imposed emotional hardship on the Children” and was “unsupported by any expressed wishes of the Decedent.”

“Had the Decedent not wanted his remains to be in the home of the Petitioner, then he would have taken care to express that wish in writing,” he concluded.

The judge also removed Woods as executor for, among other things, using his power of attorney to transfer $50,000 from the estate to Olson before the petition for probate was filed. Puckett did not name Olson as a beneficiary in his will.

By Matthew Heller
10/24/06