Alarm about a proliferation of student fights since the beginning of the school year — some taking place away from campus with students from elsewhere coming to watch and film them — was expressed by parents, student representatives and district officials during a Juneau Board of Education meeting Tuesday night.
Most of the comments referred to fights at Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé, where nearly all students in grades 9-12 are now attending following the consolidation of schools that converted Thunder Mountain High School to a middle school. However, officials said Tuesday they also plan to investigate possible such incidents at Thunder Mountain as well as other district schools.
“I have seen more violence during my few months here at JD than I did the three years of my TM, which is outrageous,” Elijah Keaton, a senior who is a JDHS student representative for the school board, during Tuesday’s meeting.
A lot of the fights involving JDHS students are occurring off-campus, said Aster Davis, a student board representative from the alternative Yaaḵoosgé Daakahídi High School, in her comments at the meeting.
“A very popular thing over in downtown is to leave school grounds and going somewhere else to fight, is what I’ll say,” she said. “It’s so bad that even students from Yaaḵoosgé are leaving to go see the fights, which is really annoying.”
Three parents and a teacher raised concerns about the fights — including injuries to their kids and discipline imposed for what they said was self-defense — during the public testimony portion of the meeting.
District Superintendent Frank Hauser, in response to a board member question about how district staff are responding to the reported incidents, said “I’ve already reached out and had my staff start to get that process (going).”
“What I’ve asked for is fights and disruptive behaviors, and pulling incident reports and discipline reports for both in-school and out-of-school suspension so we can track kind of what that is,” he said. “I’m looking primarily at Thunder Mountain Middle School and Juneau Douglas High School and Yaaḵoosgé Daakahídi High School.”
Reports from other schools will be also pulled, as well as data from previous years, Hauser said.
“I’ve also reached out to building administration about having a conversation tomorrow morning about the reports that have already come through,” he said.
The district’s disciplinary policies for students involved in fights and the absence of security cameras inside the high school are concerning, said Crystal Keaton, a special education paraeducator at JDHS. She cited an incident where three or four kids were attacking another student in the hallway outside her classroom and “it took me two or three hours after that fight to actually calm down just from witnessing that.”
“I didn’t realize that we had a policy that we punished students who defend themselves,” she said. “I kind of get it. I get it’s a double-edged sword that if we got rid of that we might have students that try to aggravate a fight, and then wait for that swing and then they’re off the hook. But being punished for defending yourself is not completely OK to me either.”
Paige Sipniewski, described an incident resembling that situation involving her son three weeks ago.
“My son was beaten, held down and kicked in the head with a shoeprint imprinted to the side of his face, bleeding out of his ear,” she said. “He threw a few punches in self-defense against three to four attackers, surrounded by a group of eight to 10 kids, (and) three to four teachers who did not intervene because it was not deemed a life-threatening situation.”
“All of this was recorded on a phone,” Sipniewski added. “He was suspended for a day for defending himself in the JDHS hallway where there are no cameras, but it was recorded by a fellow student and shared among students.”
Stanley Sipniewski, the student’s father, said he is no longer enrolled in the Juneau School District.
“I have heard numerous bullies (and) fights breaking out among middle school and high school students,” he said. “The point is it’s out of control.”
Hauser said there are exterior cameras at schools and interior cameras have been discussed by the district’s facilities committee.
“That would be one area that I would recommend that the board consider, to start to put cameras in hallways within the schools for common public areas — not in classrooms, not in restrooms, obviously,” he said.
As for determining which students to discipline, Hauser said in his conversations with students and parents a key factor is “what led up to that situation.” Also considered, he said, is if a student with advance knowledge about a possible fight notified school officials.
“We have the ability — and this is something that I know a lot of districts really enforce as well — is if students are actively going and videotaping, or promoting a fight, there’s discipline sanctions that could be put against them too for videotaping and promoting and encouraging fights taking place, as well as students who go to meet off school grounds,” he said, adding “if it’s during school time then they still are in the jurisdiction of the school” even if off-campus.
The Juneau Police Department has school resource officers who work with the district to address incidents such as fights, Hauser said. However, “when it comes to JPD’s role in a fight that happens on school grounds…discipline sanction is the school’s responsibility.”
“The Juneau School District cannot ask the police to press charges on students,” he said. “That has to be an individual, a student or a parent going to JPD, and saying this took place.”
Questions submitted by the Empire to JPD following Tuesday night’s meeting did not receive a response as of midday Wednesday.
Fights at schools have occurred over the years, people testifying during the meeting agreed. But Josh Keaton — Elijah’s father — said what’s happening this year appears to be different.
“We have kids coming from other schools to beat kids in high school — this has never happened, right?” he said. While he said he doesn’t necessarily think it’s related to the school consolidation, “you did put double the amount of kids in a school, right, so I expect things to happen.”
School board Vice President Emil Mackey, noting “we were kind of blindsided by the public testimony today,” said immediate attention to the situation is needed since “public safety is actually stated in our facilities as the highest priority.” Board member Elizabeth Siddon, in a similar vein, said “I’m feeling a little bit caught off guard, which is uncomfortable not to even know what’s happening in our facilities.”
“So I’d like to figure out how we as a board are better informed about what’s happening, but also then our actions to improve it,” she said. “I don’t want us to stop at just getting a discipline report from the principal. I would like to see concrete paths forward of how we are going to improve student safety for students at the high school. And I hope I speak for all of us (that) there is nothing more important. I just cannot believe the testimony that we heard tonight.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
