A swimming and diving coach at the Germantown High School in Milwaukee was axed over personal opinions shared on his Facebook account. Tim Damico compared Black Lives Matter to the Ku Klux Klan.
In an interview with the WISN-AM radio talk show host Mark Belling, Damico expressed that his dismissal was connected to his post on Facebook and that he as a conservative would never support the Black Lives Matter “organization.”
Damico said that his school was concerned about his Facebook posts for a while now. “I’m a conservative gun owner who supports President Trump and I will never stop supporting what I believe just to save my job,” says Damico.
Damico served as the coach at the school for three seasons. But the Facebook post comparing the organization to the Ku Klux Klan was the last straw as his contract wasn’t renewed for the next season.
The high school’s athletic director Sara Unertl allegedly told Damico that the district needs to be “on the right side of history.”
Unertl, however, refused to comment on Damico’s claims whereas the school board’s president Bob Soderberg said: “As a district, we have a duty to our students, our staff and our community to make certain that our sports programs and activities are not disrupted, and that our personnel don’t actively discourage the student body for going out for sports. We felt that his behavior would cause such a substantial disruption within our swimming program that would seriously damage student participation.”
What’s more, Soderberg also said that Damico didn’t distinguish between the movement Black Lives Matter and the organization, making it unclear whether the ex-coach was disregarding the whole movement or just the organization.
