Laraine Cook, the girl’s basketball coach at Pocatello High School, was fired after a photo of her boyfriend grabbing her breasts was posted on Facebook.
“I don’t feel that it’s an immoral photo, and that’s what the termination is based on,” Cook told Local 8 News in an interview earlier this week.
According to Opposing Views her boyfriend Tom Harris — the high school’s football coach — was reportedly reprimanded but has not been removed from his position. Parents of the players on the basketball team are outraged by what they call the unfair termination of Cook and have met with school district officials to express their concerns, causing the school to review Cook’s termination. In the end the decision to remove her from her position stood. Cook is in the process of fighting with the district to get her job back and many of the parents are on her side.
“We believe she’s an awesome coach. We think she’s a great influence on our daughters. Did she make some bad choices? Yeah… But I think she received it in a lot of humility,” Dave Reichelt, whose daughter plays basketball at Pocatello, told KPVI in October. “My daughter has been empowered by coach Cook, and not just in basketball, but in life as well.”
According to Cook, the reason Harris was not fired is because she is the one who posted the photo. More and more people are losing their jobs and getting themselves into trouble over the things they post on the internet. From Cook’s incident to the girl who dressed up as a Boston Marathon victim for Halloween, or the girl who posted the picture of her friends dressed up as Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman for Halloween, sometimes it is better to close out of your apps. As my mother so eloquently puts it, “Stop pressing send”.
What do my readers think? Was the photo Cook posted enough for her to lose her job or was she unfairly terminated?