It’s all over the local news by now, but one of our former teachers and advisors was sentenced today for grand larceny. The former teacher advised several student activities and coached during his years at GCS. During that time he managed to short our student activity accounts to the tune of at least $81,000. This happened a couple of years ago, was found by our central treasurer, Susan Rebmann, and confirmed by our own business office and outside auditors.
This all came to light in the first year that Sue and I were here, the 2004-2005 school year, so you can see that this man’s sentencing was a long time in coming. I’m happy he’s sitting in the county jail today instead of the story running on America’s Most Wanted. Thanks to the efforts of the NYS police and our own SRO, Jennifer Alessi, he was arrested when he returned to the area for a different court case in December. He’s been in jail since then and remains there after sentencing today, completing his 6 months of jail time which will be followed by 5 years of probation. The restitution issue will remain in the courts for some time. He will never teach in New York state again.
This has been a complex issue for many of our former students as they admired their teacher, advisor, coach. I should say that they still do admire him as several students have continued to show their support of Gill. I think this support shows one of two things, probably depending on the person. One, the support can show that all of us are multifaceted individuals, bringing both good and bad to the table. Members of our school community who continued to support the former teacher must continually look to the good that they find in him. Two, the support may show that it’s easier to assume the school district was at fault than to admit to being duped by someone. Either way, each individual is entitled to judge the former teacher based on his or her own knowledge of the man.
While there are lots of reasons to justify, debate, argue or fault his actions, for me, the main injustice has always been that he took advantage of the very students for whom he was entrusted to care. Every day, we can find students working hard in our community at part time minimum wage jobs to pay for the many expenses of the junior and senior school years. Working at Jubilee or Rite Aid or one of our fast food restaurants to save up enough money to pay for the prom, senior dinner dance, the senior trip, and yearbook. I hate that those same hard working kids paid more for many of those things than they otherwise would have because the fundraising events that they were also working hard on didn’t supplement the costs. Their trusted advisor and teacher instead pocketed tens of thousands of dollars, at the expense of those students. I find that reprehensible. That’s personal. It affected every student who fund-raised, bought a yearbook, paid for athletic gear, went to the senior dinner dance.
That’s why I’m glad he’ll never teach again, that he continues to sit in jail, that he’s paying the consequences of his actions. That’s why it was worth my time this morning to travel to Olean, to sit in the court room, to wait to hear the sentencing. For every student who couldn’t be there, I was, to hear him be held accountable. For every member of our community who bought a ticket to a spaghetti dinner thinking it was in support of our kids, but was really supporting this teacher, I was there to hear the consequences.