Daniel Fish was fired last week as head football coach of the Flagler Palm Coast High School team he’d led for the last two years. The school district said he would remain a member of the FPC faculty. The district did not explain why he’d lost the football job. He’d led the team to a 9-2 record in the recently ended season, and appeared to have the support of students on the team.
“I was never given an explanation as to why I’m not the head football coach anymore and I was reassigned as a teacher,” Fish texted the Observer earlier this week, after Flagler Broadcasting’s Mike Lischio first reported the firing.
Fish’s statement is at odds with the records obtained by FlaglerLive. Following an internal investigation that ended in December, Fish was the subject of a letter of reprimand for a series of grave failures in his teaching and administrative duties. It was the second disciplinary write-up for Fish in 14 months. He had been the subject of a “letter of caution” in October 2023 following a violent incident that had started among student-athletes in the football team’s unsupervised locker room.
Leading up to the latest reprimand, Flagler Palm Coast High School Principal Bobby Bossardet had reported to district Coordinator of Professional Standards Michael Rinaldi in early December that Fish was “failing to instruct his students according to the standards, was failing to keep accurate records for students, was inflating grades and was not teaching any of the standards for the course that was a graduation requirement.” The failures endured even after Fish had received “Professional Learning opportunities,” administrative counseling and training to improve his record-keeping and course planning.
Fish, a 30-year-old resident of Ormond Beach, had been the head football coach at Father Lopez High School in Daytona Beach before taking the job at FPC in April 2023. The Catholic school’s athletic director had described Fish as “an amazing man” with “loads of potential” when Bossardet contacted him for a reference, while the principal told him there was “no reason that she is aware of that he should not be around students.” (The head football coaching job at FPC had earned him all of $4,500 for the season.)
was issued the letter of reprimand on Dec. 17. The letter sustained the charges against him. “Should you exhibit negligent teaching practices in the future, it may result in further disciplinary action up to, and including, your dismissal from employment with Flagler County Schools,” Bossardet wrote Fish, who signed the letter.
Fish disputed the reprimand in writing. “Why am I getting a reprimand now when no one has said anything to me?” he wrote among a list of “concerns” that included his complaints that he had received “no onboarding” (the term is used as a synonym for orientation or training), had had “No conversations about this at department meetings,” had not received assistance with the gradebook, had asked what he could do after his evaluation resulted in a middling grade, only to be told that “this one doesn’t matter, it’s the formal observation anyway that matters,” and had been without WiFi for three months.
The internal investigation found that Fish had been a “no show for onboarding” in April 2023, that he’d received assistance with the gradebook that same month, and that he’d been invited to a new teacher training program provided by the North East Florida Educational Consortium but did not sign up or show up (the district pays $3.3 million to be part of the consortium, which provides a range of services, teacher training being only a small part).
The investigation also listed three dates in February, March and April 2024 when he either did not sign up or did not respond to new teacher meetings (he had attended one such meeting in November 2023). The investigative documents note the dates of several emails sent informing faculty of available help and tutorials on some of the items Fish had said he’d not been helped with, and additional forms of faculty support he either did not attend or did not respond to. (Fish did not respond to an email before this article initially published.)
On the other hand, documents showed that he had attended and completed training for gradebook use and “Schoology,” the district’s web-based learning-management system accessed by teachers, students and parents. He had also attended a series of in-service sessions training him on various skills.
One document points to what appears to be grade inflation. The document lists the aggregated class grades of two dozen teachers and courses, with grades broken down into quarters and ranging from low to high percentages, except for Fish’s aggregates: 100 percent across the board. (He taught personal fitness.)
In sum, Fish, as his letter bulleted, was reprimanded for
- “Failure to plan and effectively implement instructional activities designed to achieve goals and objectives of the cu11iculum you are assigned to teach.
- “Failure to evaluate student academic progress on a regular basis in relation to the established curriculum standards.
- “Failure to maintain accurate, complete and correct records for the students enrolled in your classes.”
- “Failure in practice that the educator’s primary professional concern will always be for the students and for the development of the student’s potential.” (That was listed as a violation of the policy that requires the educator to “strive for professional growth and will seek lo exercise the best professional judgment and integrity.”)
- Another violation of the policy that educators “Shall not intentionally suppress 01· d1stort subject matter relevant to a student’s academic program.”
It was not Fish’s first disciplinary action. He’d been on the job five months when, in October 2023, Bossardet issued him a “letter of caution” for failing to properly supervise student athletes. The disciplinary letter was the result of a September 19, 2023 incident in the locker room involving student athletes. A student had entered the unsupervised locker room, grabbed a stick, and started chasing another student with it in wat started as crude roughhousing, only to devolve into a more violent confrontation involving a one student putting another in a chokehold and wrestling him to the ground, as one o the students described it in the internal investigation. “All the boys were wrestling around on the floor and were laughing,” one of several students quoted in the investigation reported.
“No, he never put it in him,” the student reported of the stick, in an allusion of a homoerotic act. “I saw him drop it. It looked like he was going to put it in, but had a change of thought, and did not.” The student added: “Everyone was messing around. They always do it.” There were intimations of a fight later on, and one of the students involved took swings at Fish and other members of the coaching staff, calling them “crackers” and making death threats. One of the students’ mother arrived and went on the field, upset at the coaching staff–and calling Fish a “cracker” and other derogatory and sexually suggestive–and bigoted–terms, according to a witness’ report, threatening them with jail.
The investigation determined that while coach Ward Silvola was supposed to have been supervising the locker room if it was left unlocked, that day Fish had directed him to work with members of the team on the field. Fish did not assign a back-up supervisor. Bossardet disciplined Fish, and referred the matter to the state Office of Professional Practices Services, which, fortunately for Fish, determined that further action by the state office was not warranted.
