A local police chief said he was told this week he could no longer volunteer as a coach for the Randolph Union High School girls soccer team due to an incomplete background check. But he claims the decision is retaliation for publicly opposing the use of a girls locker room by a transgender student on the school’s girls volleyball team.
John Helfant, a parent of three students in the Orange Southwest School District and chief of the Northfield Police Department, was informed on Monday that he could not coach the soccer team until his background check was completed.
“The district has no record of you completing the background check procedure, specifically the fingerprinting check,” superintendent Layne Millington wrote to Helfant in an email Monday. “Beginning immediately and continuing until this matter is resolved, you cannot volunteer in any role or for any activity within the OSSD.”
Helfant suspects ulterior motives.
“I will take this as retaliation for my comments against the OSSD and will be informing my attorney,” the chief wrote in response to the superintendent. “As you know I am a police officer of 32yrs. I obviously have no criminal record or would not have been able to retire from the State Police nor would I still be Chief of Police in (Northfield) if I did.”
At issue is how exactly volunteers must submit their fingerprints and associated authorization form. Helfant said he took his own fingerprints in August and argues it’s the employer’s responsibility to submit the fingerprint authorization form — in this case, the school district.
Millington said it’s the responsibility of the volunteer to submit their fingerprint form to the entity taking their fingerprints — typically a law enforcement agency — which then sends the form to the Vermont Crime Information Center. The official Orange Southwest School District fingerprint authorization form appears to corroborate his assertion.
Helfant provided VTDigger a portion of his email exchange with Millington but declined to send the entire chain. VTDigger later received additional emails through a public records request to the school district.
The additional emails indicate that the school district submitted the fingerprint form for Helfant, which Millington said went against the district’s typical procedure. He also declined Helfant’s offer to present his own background check, which Millington called a “conflict of interest,” and said Helfant’s forms were the “only ones not in from the August batch.”
Still, Helfant believes he is being punished for comments he made after WCAX broadcast a story in September featuring a student volleyball player objecting to a transgender teammate’s use of a school locker room. Subsequent coverage by right-wing media organizations led to the girl being bullied and harassed, according to her family.
In a commentary Helfant wrote for the Vermont Daily Chronicle, which he said he also emailed to the school district, the chief suggested that Millington, Randolph Union High School leadership and the school board might be criminal accessories to voyeurism for allowing transgender students to use the locker rooms associated with their gender identity at the same time as other students.
Helfant also reacted this summer to a Black Lives Matter flag flying at Randolph Union High School, which became the center of a public backlash. At that time, Helfant requested that the district take down the flag and instead fly “Don’t Tread on Me” and “Thin Blue Line” flags, Seven Days reported.
Millington denies that Helfant was barred from volunteering for any reason other than the background check.
“The district behaved as it must and any claim of capriciousness is pure nonsense,” he wrote to VTDigger in an email. “Imagine that we knew a required background check was missing and we did nothing about it. Any rational person can see the liability in that scenario.”
Helfant, though, is not the only Randolph coach to be recently removed from the field.
The day after Helfant was informed he could no longer volunteer, Travis Allen — father of the Randolph volleyball team member featured in WCAX’s initial story — was suspended without pay from his job as a Randolph middle school girls soccer coach, the Daily Signal reported.
Allen confirmed the details of that report to VTDigger but declined to provide emails he exchanged with the school district, citing the advice of his lawyer. Allen was suspended from his coaching role after misgendering a transgender player and refusing to publicly apologize, according to the report he confirmed.
Millington declined to comment, writing that “in this case, Mr. Allen is clearly a district employee, so we have to preserve his rights to confidentiality on any employment matters.”
Helfant, meanwhile, hopes to be back on the soccer field soon.
“I’m gonna go up and watch their game in Stowe right now,” he said Thursday afternoon. “I’ll just watch from the parent side of things.”
