DINKINS
PAXTON — A former Gibson City-Melvin-Sibley coach and teacher charged with six counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse for alleged sexual activities with a high-school student waived his right to a preliminary hearing in Ford County Circuit Court on Wednesday, July 9.
Robert L. “Robbie” Dinkins, 38, of Gibson City, appeared before Livingston County Judge Mary Koll, who was reassigned the case last month, with his two private attorneys and special prosecutor Kate Kurtz attending remotely via Zoom. Koll set a pretrial hearing for 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 8. In the meantime, Dinkins was ordered to have no communication via letter or otherwise with any minors.
Dinkins — a 13-year employee of the GCMS school district who was fired in April from his positions as eighth-grade math teacher and coach of the eighth-grade boys’ basketball and boys’ track teams and GCMS/Fisher varsity soccer team — was arrested on a Ford County warrant on June 5 in Macon, Ga., and later transported from the Bibb County Jail in Georgia to the Ford County Jail in Paxton. On June 23, Dinkins was ordered detained through trial.
Gibson City Police Chief Adam Rosendahl said in a June news release that an investigation revealed “there was data to support Mr. Dinkins having participated in sexual activities with a high-school age student.”
According to a “statement of charges” against Dinkins that resulted from GCMS’s initial third-party investigation into his conduct and led to his April 23 firing, Dinkins maintained inappropriate relationships with students and repeatedly crossed “the boundaries between employee-student to such an extent that the parents of the students … perceived (his) actions as the grooming of these children for sexual abuse.” That included claims that Dinkins spent time with students “one-on-one,” both at school and at his home, and communicated with them via text outside of the school day, sometimes about his own or their own personal matters.
Dinkins was placed on paid administrative leave on April 4, five days after the probe into his conduct began. On March 30, Gibson City police met with concerned parents of a GCMS student who claimed that their child had been receiving “concerning text messages” from Dinkins, Rosendahl said. Police later executed a search warrant at Dinkins’ residence, where they seized his phone and other electronics for forensic analysis, Rosendahl said.
In May, Dinkins declined to comment to the Chronicle about the allegations against him.
Over seven years as the head soccer coach of the Fisher/GCMS Bunnies, Dinkins posted a 116-24- 9 record, including an IHSA Class 1A round-of-16 postseason appearance last fall. Before coaching the eighth-grade boys’ basketball team in the 2024-25 season, Dinkins served as an assistant coach for the high school’s boys’ basketball team, as well.
Prior to working at GCMS, Dinkins was an eighth-grade student teacher at Wilmington Middle School in fall 2011 and worked in a sixth-grade teaching practicum at Franklin Middle School in fall 2010 and an eighth-grade practicum at Cumberland Middle School in Toledo in spring 2011. He previously was employed as a forklift operator at FedEx in Effingham in summer 2010, as a driver/service technician for Wilmington Backyard Pools in Wilmington in the summers of 2008 and 2009, as a laborer for J.P. Larson in Chicago in 2006 and as a forklift operator at Menard’s.