Several months ago, when East Bridgewater High School Athletic Director John Lucier was first suspended for unknown reasons, Superintendent of Schools Margaret Strojny told the community she couldn’t comment on an ongoing investigation, but said: “When the investigation is completed there will be a resolution.” Lucier resigned from the school, and everything changed.

The school dropped their investigation, and the next time we heard about Lucier, it was from the police when he was charged with two counts of providing alcohol to a minor, one of which occurred at East Bridgewater High School.

Then, nothing. It certainly doesn’t feel like a resolution.

To be fair, this is a tricky situation for the schools, as it would be for any employer.  It’s a sticky legal situation, and we don’t blame folks for being overly cautious in this litigious society.

But among the charges filed against Lucier is the allegation that he gave alcohol to a student in his office, on school property.  This happened under the superintendent’s nose, and it needs to be addressed.

But it’s not just the official channels that are silent here. There doesn’t seem to be a demand for answers from the residents and school parents of East Bridgewater.

The lack of knowledge when a teacher leaves under a cloud of suspicion is not a complaint unique to East Bridgewater.  We’ve been reading   reports all over the state –– and indeed the country –– about school teachers or coaches mysteriously leaving their posts, and parents are left with unanswered questions. The only thing the schools will ever say is a vague statement about “improper conduct.”  If no charges are filed in court, parents may never know what happened.

This is a shame, and it’s something parents of school children everywhere should be questioning. We trust teachers with our children for eight hours a day. Although 99 percent of them deserve that trust, when one does something wrong, we deserve to know the full truth.

In East Bridgewater, after Lucier’s arrest on charges of providing alcohol to a minor, the response from the town has been silence. The School Committee only mentioned the matter in the briefest of terms, to accept Lucier’s resignation. It seems the community would rather pretend this never happened. This does every student and parent of a school-age child in town an injustice.

Parents should be asking the school what they knew, and when they knew it. And the school should be telling parents why this won’t happen again. Maybe the school district isn’t legally able to answer every question in the minds of parents.  But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have the conversation.

Again, Lucier hasn’t been convicted of anything. He is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. But that doesn’t mean that East Bridgewater, as a community, shouldn’t be having a dialogue about the issue of what’s appropriate in the student/teacher relationship.   There’s only one way to make the problem worse – ignoring it, and pretending nothing ever happened.