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Assistant principal serves suspension; teacher fights his

Their penalties involved a Tarpon Springs High fire that did $34,000 in damage.

By TAMARA EL-KHOURY
Published September 30, 2005

Old World tradition met space-age technology one afternoon this spring at Tarpon Springs High School.

The result was a costly fire and trouble for a teacher and an assistant principal.

The Pinellas County School Board this week approved a 10-day suspension for assistant principal Emmanuel Gombos as a result of the fire on May 5. The teacher, Richard Latherow, asked for an administrative hearing to fight his recommended five-day suspension.

The idea had been to use a laser-etching machine to make 20,000 plastic crosses for Tarpon Springs' Epiphany celebration. The school would be paid $10,000 for the work, which was approved by Gombos, one of the organizers of the annual event.

But Latherow walked away for 21/2 hours, school officials said. Plastic jammed in the machine, which caused a piece of plastic to fall on the heating unit. The resulting fire did $34,000 in damage - more than three times what the school would have earned from the project.

The fire destroyed the machine and damaged the counter, walls and ceiling of the former classroom, said Sterling Ivey, spokesman for Pinellas County schools.

No students were working with the machine, and most had gone home for the day when the incident occurred at 2:30 p.m., Ivey said.

Gombos, who declined to comment Thursday, is popular, well-known and highly respected around Tarpon Springs. He dived for the cross more than three decades ago and graduated from Tarpon Springs High in 1969. He has worked at Tarpon Springs High School for 31 years, first as a teacher, and has been an assistant principal for 14 years.

"He's always volunteering to get people to support their various programs, whether it's football or culinary arts or the 100th anniversary of the school, which is coming up, or the alumni association of the school," said Vasile Faklis, a former spokesman for Tarpon Springs' Epiphany. "He's the one promoting all that."

A 1985 graduate of Tarpon Springs High School, Faklis, 38, said Gombos does a lot of the behind-the-scenes work to promote the school.

"His students and his school are his life," Faklis said.

The school had been contracted to produce items for Epiphany since 2003, Ivey said, but never in such large quantities. He said there are other schools in the county that contract with businesses or their communities to do printing jobs and other work.

The etching machine hadn't been used for two years before the day of the fire because of improper ventilation, according to the school district. In the past, a teacher had an asthma attack caused by the odor of the plastic.

Gombos "used poor judgment and negligence," said superintendent Clayton Wilcox in a memo to the School Board recommending his suspension.

He cited other reasons justifying the suspension. He said Gombos knew the smell of burning plastic made it hard for students and faculty to breathe and that Latherow didn't know how to use the machine until he was trained by a previous student.

Gombos also didn't properly supervise Latherow, didn't fill out the required activity request form and didn't get permission from his principal, district officials said.

Gombos accepted Wilcox's recommendation of a 10-day suspension without pay and attendance at liability training in an agreement signed Sept. 9.

At Tuesday's meeting, the School Board formally approved the suspension, which Gombos has already served, Ivey said.

Wilcox recommended that Latherow, a Tarpon Springs High teacher since 1977, be suspended for five days without pay, and Wilcox asked the School Board to require him to attend liability training. Ivey said the School Board didn't act on that recommendation because Latherow asked for an administrative hearing before members of the Office of Professional Standards.

[Last modified September 30, 2005, 01:35:17]