Kentucky High School Denies Allegations Out Basketball Player Was Deliberately Cut From Yearbook

The school superintendent for Floyd County, where out basketball player Dalton Maldonado attends Betsy Layne High School, has issued a statement regarding the omission of Maldonado's picture with his varsity basketball team in the school's yearbook:

Today my office has been contacted by several media outlets asking for our response to an allegation made in an article on the Outsports.com website. According to the author, there was an organized and deliberate attempt by school staff to omit an individual student athlete’s picture from the yearbook because the student athlete had publicly announced that he was gay.

A district level administrator was assigned to conduct an inquiry into the allegation and report his findings directly to me. Yes, the individual picture for the student athlete was omitted from the school’s basketball section through error. According to the photographer, the student athlete did have his picture taken along with other team members but he requested the digital file be sent to him for approval and editing and she did comply with his request. The file was returned by the student athlete to the photographer but the file that was sent by the photographer to the school did to not contain a photo for this specific student athlete. During the review process at the school which involved several different individuals the omission was not found.

As to the assertion there was a deliberate attempt to harass the student athlete by omitting his photograph from the yearbook, that claim is totally false and without merit. The student appears in the yearbook in fifteen separate photos. The photos are both group and individual and one is a Senior Superlative for School Spirit. There are also several photos of the student athlete taken during basketball games. We do acknowledge that none of these images may be as meaningful to the student athlete as his individual basketball picture and we apologize to him and his family for the error.

Maldonado posted on his Facebook page earlier this week that he felt his picture was purposely cut from the varsity basketball team two-page spread in the year book due to his coming out.