news-record.com

GREENSBORO — Guilford County Schools disciplined Northwest Guilford High School boys basketball coach Manny Bloom on Wednesday for misleading officials here about a Florida school system’s investigation into his handling of improper basketball camps.

Nora Carr, chief of staff for Superintendent Maurice “Mo” Green, said Wednesday night at least one other Northwest employee had also been disciplined. Carr would not identify the other employee nor would she discuss what discipline was taken, saying privacy laws prohibited her from elaborating.

Bloom was not demoted from his faculty position — he is a behavior improvement teacher at Northwest High — but it is unclear if he is still the Vikings’ basketball coach.

Bloom did not return phone calls Wednesday. Reached in Virginia where he was vacationing, Northwest Guilford Athletics Director John Hughes, who hired Bloom, said school system officials sent him a letter pertaining to the investigation, but he has not read it yet.

The school system’s announcement came the same day Palm Beach County School District officials offered their strongest statement yet that Bloom had violated their school board’s policy for running a series of basketball camps that generated more than $420,000 in revenue.

Nat Harrington, a spokesman for the Florida school system, said Bloom’s infractions were serious enough that Palm Beach Superintendent Art Johnson recommended last year that Bloom be disciplined.

Bloom’s disciplinary hearing was dropped only after he resigned last summer, Harrington said.

Harrington’s remarks were the latest by Palm Beach school officials that stand in direct contrast to the account Bloom gave Northwest Guilford officials when he interviewed with the school last year.

Bloom has repeatedly said he informed Hughes and principal Angelo Kidd of the investigation into his basketball camps, but said Palm Beach school officials had cleared him of any wrongdoing.

After the News & Record reported the discrepancies last month, Guilford County Schools officials said they would investigate the matter themselves.

At the time of his resignation last year from Boca Raton High School, Bloom and the school’s principal were being investigated by district officials for depositing $421,983 in proceeds from for-profit basketball camps and clinics into three private accounts.

Two of those accounts were personal accounts belonging to Bloom, according to documents from the investigation.

Because the camps were for-profit ventures, Palm Beach officials said Bloom should have signed a lease with the school system or deposited the proceeds into an internal school account. School officials determined Bloom should have paid more than $100,000 to the school district for use of the gym.

Bloom has maintained that the school’s principal did not require him to sign a lease because Bloom’s camp gave some money back to the school and because the camps were serving local youth.

Hughes said last month he called about 20 people in Florida before hiring Bloom last summer.

In a June 5 e-mail to Kidd, Hughes said, “I was confident (Bloom) was operating in a honest, up-front manner with all of the finances at Boca High School. The Palm Beach area school district did an audit ... and Manny and the principal was (sic) cleared.”

In fact, Harrington said Wednesday the principal also violated the Palm Beach school board’s policy by failing to have Bloom sign a lease. The principal, Geoff McKee, is scheduled to be disciplined July 29, Harrington said.

Contact Robert Bell at 373-7055 or robert.bell@news-record.com