GREENVILLE - Betraying the public trust is always a serious matter - especially when impressionable young minds are involved.
For the past several weeks, a media feeding frenzy has surrounded the South Delta School District in Rolling Fork over the hiring of Lynn Lang as a health education teacher and football coach at South Delta High School.
Superintendent Georgia Russell hired the Greenville native last month in the face of a federal probe into the former Memphis Trezevant High School head football coach's involvement in an alleged $200,000 payoff for directing Albert Means, a blue-chip defensive player, to the University of Alabama.
It was no secret that South Delta School District officials were in a tizzy to find a football coach with the approach of the prep season just weeks away.
So Russell hired Lang, legal baggage and all. Last week she rued the decision as a federal grand jury, sitting in Memphis, handed up a nine-count indictment charging Lang and Milton Kirk, a former assistant coach at Trezevant, with conspiracy, bribery and extortion in connection with the Means' affair.
If convicted on all counts, Lang and Kirk, who turned themselves in Thursday and are free on bond, are facing a maximum of 20 years in federal prison.
Throughout the federal probe, Lang has vociferously maintained his innocence. You've heard the litany of alibis many times before: "I didn't do it," "I am being set up" or "You don't understand."
Last month, in an interview with the Delta Democrat Times, Lang said: "These people are only concerned with one person. It's all just talk." Obviously the federal grand jurors thought otherwise.
Lang says he received no money from a University of Alabama booster and believes much of his legal entanglement centers around the disgruntlement of Kirk.
"He was upset about the way his career was going," Lang said. For his part, Kirk told federal investigators that Lang accepted the payments from Logan Young, the Alabama booster.
A jury and a court of law will decide whether Lang and Kirk are guilty of the charges. But guilty or not, both men have violated a sacred public trust and a compact with young athletes for providing them with straight-and-narrow leadership on and off the field. Lang and Kirk have not only let the coaching profession down, but the players they attempted to lead on the field.
Russell has refused to admit she made a terrible mistake or accept any culpability in this fiasco. This was a desperate decision made solely in the name of wins and losses, in selecting a tarnished coach with a questionable past and an uncertain future.
Through it all, Russell said that Lang had been up front about the federal investigation. Well did you think he had any choice? Because the truth was eventually going to come out. It's a shame the facts were released in the form of a federal indictment.
Before Lang resigned from Trezevant High School in February, he had already been forced to forfeit several games for using ineligible players during the 2000 season.
But what does this tawdry episode tell our student-athletes? Being a football coach is more than diagramming the X's and O's, and breaking down film; it is giving these young players a springboard which will transcend sports and take them into adulthood.
In that regard, Lang has failed miserably. But even more damaging, he has muddied the image of public education.
Russell and the school board which endorsed this illogical decision should all resign to restore public confidence in an educational system that is obviously foundering in mediocrity.
