POCATELLO—The video is grainy and only about 16 seconds long, but the disturbing nature of its content will not be lost on the viewer.
Taken in the Hawthorne Middle School boys’ locker room, the video opens with a male student wrapping his arm around the neck of another male student, who is then violently slammed to the concrete floor. The assailant then pummels his schoolmate with a barrage of kicks and punches as other kids, who are off-camera, cheer the attacker on and shout profanities.
The student who videotaped the beating earlier this month with his cell phone would eventually post it on Facebook, and even included the names of the students who were present during the attack. The video was named, “HaHa Fight in the Locker Room,” and for the short time it was posted online, at least 19 other students had tagged it with Facebook’s “Like” status.
The video was provided to the Journal by a local resident.
School administrators and the Pocatello Police Department said the videotaped beating was thoroughly investigated and proper disciplinary action was taken against the students involved. The student who posted the video on Facebook was ordered by school officials to take the video down immediately after they found out about it.
Though this may be one of the first publicly reported cases of a school fight being visually recorded and posted online in Southeastern Idaho, many school districts across the country have also encountered the issue.
In September of 2012, a school district in Missouri was alerted by parents to the presence of a student fight club that recorded its brawls and posted them to Facebook and YouTube.
According to the Las Vegas Sun, in December of 2012 at a school in Nevada, a fist fight between two high school girls was posted on Facebook. The fight angered parents and local police officials were forced to respond.
This came after an incident a month earlier, where two brothers who attended schools in the same district, ages 13 and 15, assaulted a special education student and posted the beating online. The brothers were arrested.
Facebook is home to pages with titles like “I Love School Fights” and “Woah School Fights” with thousands of active followers. Searching “school fights” in YouTube’s search engine brings over 160,000 results, with fights in elementary, middle, and high schools, as well as colleges in the search response field. Many of the fights are clearly recorded on school property.
“I don’t get what these kids are thinking,” said Miguel Dominic, a parent of a child at Hawthorne Middle School who witnessed the recorded fight on Facebook. “Do they not understand that they are filming crimes and posting them online for the whole world to see?”
Dominic was also shocked to find that out of the 20-plus comments posted to the video by other Hawthorne students, not one of them expressed moral outrage or even questioned whether the video’s posting was appropriate.
In a screenshot of the comments posted to the Hawthorne video that was obtained by the Idaho State Journal, one student posted the fight target’s full name and referred to him as a “p***y,” while another student posted, “gay … uneven fight.”
Sometimes, online media sites can be utilized by police and school officials to identify active threats and neutralize them before violence occurs. Earlier this month, on Jan. 14, an 18-year-old former student of American Falls High School was arrested for posting a threat of gun violence on Facebook. In response, the school was placed in lockdown.
Like many school districts across the country, in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., that left 20 students and six school staff and faculty members dead, the School District 25 board of trustees recently held a special meeting/work session to address how the district can prevent violence in their schools.
At the meeting, the Pocatello Police Department presented its proposals to add gun safes in each school in the district that would contain firearms to be utilized by police and security resource officers if an incident of gun violence broke out.
However, Dominic says that a major problem with School District 25’s policies is the lack of communication between school officials and the students’ families when incidents like the Hawthorne Middle School beating arise.
“None of the parents knew about the incident until their children showed them the video on Facebook,” Dominic said, noting that one parent kept her child out of school for days after she witnessed the video out of fear of violence. “From the stories I hear from my children and their friends who attend the school, it seems that Hawthorne Middle School is a popular place for bullying and when we hear about bullying and threats of violence, we only hear about it from our kids.”
Shelley Allen, the spokesperson for School District 25, said “The law prevents us from publicly discussing disciplinary actions in regards to individual students, due to student record confidentiality. We have a policy and a procedure that is followed in regards to bullying that our teachers and staff are required to follow and report to school administrators to determine what disciplinary action should be taken.”
Parents were notified on Jan. 7 when a student at Irving Middle School was charged after threatening his classmates, saying that he was going to kill them with handguns and bow and arrows. The threats were made as school officials were having a discussion with the students of the mass shooting in Newtown. Again, school officials declined to discuss specifics because of Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) restrictions.