In the wake of alleged hazing incidents, Cheltenham parents and officials marched to support students before school starts

After a football hazing scandal led to criminal charges for coaches and players, about 35 Cheltenham School District parents, students, and school board members marched across town Saturday morning to show their support for students.

The purpose of the march, just days before school starts, was to show students that the community cares about what they are going through, and is calling on the school board to make needed changes, organizers said. Marchers also said it is important to portray the district in a positive light.

“We need to come together as a community, address needed changes, and also push back against some of the false information out there,” said Ikysha Dearry, president of the Cheltenham African American Alliance.

Dearry said the school has faced a barrage of negative attention online from opportunists who want to bring issues like race and the region’s changing demographics into the discussion. “That can have an impact, not just on how our district is viewed, but on how our students are viewed,” she said.

School board director Caroline Watts was one of the first to arrive in the parking lot behind the Cheltenham School District building Saturday morning. She wore athletic shoes for the nearly two-mile walk to the high school. Watts said the message of the march was a “delicate balancing act.”

”We’re addressing what happened, making sure it doesn’t happen again, and we’re starting the school year," Watts said.

Montgomery County prosecutors in July charged four football coaches and six players in connection with two 2025 assaults in a Cheltenham High School locker room that led to the cancellation of last year’s football season. During the assaults, prosecutors said, a 15-year-old was beaten by teammates who poked a broomstick toward his buttocks.

“It’s horrific, what happened,” board vice president Jenny Lowman said before the march. “To think that it happened more than once, it’s also horrifying. Those coaches were responsible for these children. And two of the coaches were parents of students on the football team.”

According to prosecutors, the coaches urged the player not to tell his parents. And according to a grand jury report, high school employees downplayed a complaint from the player’s mother and took then-head coach Terence Tolbert at his word that he had not instructed the boy not to tell his mom.

The report faulted the district’s handling of the situation from the start, saying employees had included Tolbert in their investigation and failed to discover there were two assaults. Employees were also confused about their duties to report child abuse, and at least five football coaches did not have clearances related to mandatory-reporter training, according to the report.

Cheltenham parent Aubria Nance said the alleged assaults have “absolutely shaken” the students. Nance, a board member of the Cheltenham African American Alliance, said students need to know their concerns are being taken seriously.

“We want the board and the interim superintendent to know that we are advocating for the safety of our students,” Nance said.

Cheltenham parent Kisha Rodwell-Green said the type of hazing she believes to have happened is called “broomsticking.” Searching online, she said, she learned that many other schools had dealt with this.

Rodwell-Green wants the board to approve funding to work with an advocacy group called Stop Hazing. She said the athletic department needs to build a “culture of trust,” one where athletes feel comfortable speaking up if something does not seem right.

“We know we have a lot to correct in our community, and we are starting to see that work being done,” said Rodwell-Green, who also serves as president of a parent-teacher organization called United Parents Group.

Still, she said, the issues Cheltenham High faces are not unique to the school, and media attention from the hazing incidents has cast an unfair light on a good school.

“Comments on Facebook got very nasty,” Rodwell-Green said. “There’s a microscope on Cheltenham, and we want to take that microscope off.”

For some community members, the criminal charges added fuel to complaints that the district has not been taking safety seriously enough. Parents of football players said they had urged the district not to hire Tolbert, citing concerns he let bullying go unchecked during his one-year stint as Abington’s head football coach.

At Cheltenham Elementary School, parents said they have been battling with the district after repeated assaults by students against peers and teachers, and pointed to the football charges as proof of a systemic problem in the district.

The district, which in May canceled the forthcoming football season, has responded to the charges by commissioning an outside investigation and hiring a new superintendent. Chris McGinley, a veteran educator who had served as Cheltenham’s superintendent two decades ago, was approved by the board on Aug. 18 to lead the district under a one-year contract. He replaces Brian Scriven, who resigned last month.

The changes also have forced high school students to grapple with the fallout.

Cheltenham senior Jackson Scott, 17, had mixed feelings. Scott, a soccer player, said it was unfair that his friends on the football team had their seasons canceled. Steps must be taken to stop such incidents from happening again, he said, but he also wondered if some of the details of the hazing incidents had been exaggerated.

Senior Isabella Pero, 17, said she was disgusted that other students said nothing despite knowing about the hazing.

Pero said she was shocked to learn that Tolbert, who taught one of her classes and seemed like a nice person, was involved. The same goes for the students involved in the alleged assaults, she said. She struggled to square her impression of the students with the violence.

“In my opinion, in the moment, you’re so hopped up in wanting to win a game, and have a good season, that you make those tainted, not good decisions,” Pero said.

Parent Michelle Gregorio said she hopes athletic director Sam Sheridan will help the district move forward. “And we don’t want to sweep under the rug what happened, but we want to let students know we’re addressing it.”