We’re starting to see more and more cases of vicious attacks by students on other students in our schools. Part of the reason we see them is because every kid is walking around with a video camera, which means they can go viral and show just how bad these attacks actually are.
But there’s also the fact that some of these are actually far more vicious than what we saw back in my day.
See, I saw my fair share of fights in school growing up. One involved a long-time bully pushing me just a bit too far, taunting me over and over again until one day he put his finger in my face and dared me to do something about it.
I did.
All I did was push slightly on his hand so his finger was elsewhere. He challenged me to do it again, so I did, and we ended up in a brawl. I regret absolutely nothing about it.
When we went to the principal’s office, there was no investigation. There were no quewstions about what happened, really. We were both handed three days detention and that was the end of it until the next time.
School officials didn’t care what happened, they just didn’t tolerate fighting.
But at least that was a fight. This most recent attack in a school wasn’t.
More than 50 people packed a school district meeting Thursday night to voice concerns about an attack that left a student injured in Pennsylvania.
The assault happened on Wednesday afternoon around 1:20 p.m. in the cafeteria of the Pennbrook Middle School in North Wales.
According to Upper Gwynedd police, surveillance video shows a seventh grader walking along a lunch table when the accused student runs toward her and begins hitting her in the head with a Stanley cup.
"This was avoidable, and the district truly failed to protect the students at Pennbrook," one parent said at the meeting. "What are we supposed to say to our children after this? How do I send him back to school?"
"I just don't know what went wrong. How did it get to this point? I would like answers on that," another parent said.
The school district did not respond to any of the parents' questions at the meeting. Officials say the incident is under investigation.
Emily, a student at the school, witnessed the attack as others were eating lunch.
"I just hear all this screaming and everybody running. All of sudden you just hear these terrible loud bangs of the Stanley bouncing off her head," the student recalled. "We had to sit in there and watch them clean up the blood off those tables and ground, and we had to watch them take her out with blood dripping down her face, and I will never forget that."
Apparently, there was a lot of blood and a number of the students watching felt traumatized. I’m not sure that’s true—the term “traumatized” gets thrown around a lot these days—but if the attack was bad enough, it might well be accurate.
It seems that students approached school officials and warned them that “something” was going to happen at lunch. They clearly did nothing to prepare for the possibility that the students were correct.
Nor did they listen to parents who warned there was an issue with this particular kid.
That’s bad.
However, I’m more upset by how the principal addressed the issue.
The school's principal, Nick Taylor, sent a letter to parents that says in part: "The safety of our students is of the utmost importance."
The letter went on to say, "I ask that parents speak with their children about the consequences of fighting."
"This isn't a fight. This is an assault," Palovcak said.
Agreed. This isn’t a fight.
If you do something like this to someone on the streets, you get arrested and locked up. Depending on how bad things turned out—and the victim apparently needed stitches and was put on a concussion protocol, so it was bad enough—this become felony assault.
But the principal just thinks of it as a fight.
No, the problem is that because of the way the schools deal with fighting, it punishes those who defend themselves on school campuses. It allows the predatory among the student body to pick the time and place of their assaults, allowing them to get away with them and become more and more brazen.
School officials view anything like this as fighting, then punish everyone involved in a fight equally, all without even a moment of consideration that someone might well be defending themselves.
This particular student is reported to have pulled a knife on one student, has now assaulted one with a steel tumbler, and has likely gotten away with how many other attacks over the years if he’s the discipline problem being reported?
How many ass whoopings might have changed his attitude? How many victims standing up for themselves and going toe-to-toe with this kid might have made him realize there were, in fact, consequences to his action?
Instead, those who might be willing to stand up don’t out of fear their lives will be ruined—at least, that’s how it feels from a school kid’s perspective—and allow those predators to go unchallenged.
This isn’t an issue of fighting in schools, at least the way the principal suggests.
No, this is an issue of kids being prevented from standing up for themselves by a system dedicated to making sure they learn to be dependent on the state for their safety—a state that cannot guarantee that safety in the least, as is evidenced by this particular assault.
At some point, the little thugs in training need to get their butts stomped flat and it’s never going to be the teachers or administrators who do it. Half the time, they seem to be willfully not seeing the attacks in the first place.
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When I played football in high school - I think face masks had just been invented 😄 - we had to practice in the gym one day. Our starting left tackle made a snotty remark about the girl friend of our captain and star running back. Suddenly the tackle was lifted off his feet and slammed against a wall until he apologized to the captain (and his girlfriend).
No coach intervened; nobody on the team was stupid enough to attempt to. Matter settled, no disciplinary action, and as I remember it we won the next game.
Were it that we had such civilized fights these days.