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Former transportation director for Hernando schools drops appeal in harassment case

 
Published May 3, 2016

BROOKSVILLE — The Hernando County School District's former transportation director — set to be fired last year after an investigation showed he had sexually harassed a female employee — has dropped his appeal and submitted his resignation.

Doug Compton, 47, filed notice with the state Division of Administrative Hearings on Friday announcing his decision to "abandon and/or dismiss" the appeal, according to the division's website.

Administrative Law Judge E. Gary Early submitted an order Monday formally closing the case and canceling a hearing that had been scheduled for later in the week. In an April 29 letter to the district, Compton's lawyer, Jack Hoogewind of Dade City, said Compton still "vehemently denies the allegations ... (but) he simply does not have the financial resources to fight this matter further."

The action will allow the district to hire a permanent leader for a department that has been without one since the start of the school year.

Compton had been suspended without pay while he appealed superintendent Lori Romano's recommendation, in September, that he be fired. That action was based on findings of an investigation that began after a former transportation manager reported Compton had sent inappropriate texts to a female employee, according the notes of Heather Martin, the district's executive director of business services.

Among the texts Martin retrieved from the employee's phone were repeated requests for sex or photos of her breasts. One text also tied sexual favors to a possible promotion.

Compton replied that he didn't write the texts and that the former manager who reported them had been seeking revenge because her job was eliminated in an earlier reorganization.

But in Martin's notes of her investigation, she wrote that records from the cell service provider show that the times Compton sent texts to the employee's phone match those of the texts she received.

"The text message log provided by the cellular service company confirms the texts were sent from Doug Compton's cellphone," Martin wrote.

Contact Dan DeWitt at ddewitt@tampabay.com; follow @ddewitttimes.