A teenage girl who was assaulted by a classmate has been suspended from a Texas high school for fighting back, though a cell phone video of the incident shows her being beaten on a classroom floor with no teacher in sight.
“I don’t even know how to fight,” the Cypress Ridge High
School senior, who did not want to be named, told local KHOU 11
News.
The teen says that the girl who attacked her is a bully who
approached her for no reason and started punching and kicking her
in a classroom during her sixth period class. The victim says
that as the bully approached, her mind was blank and she
“didn’t know what to do or what to think.”
A 45-second video recording that surfaced on the Internet after the attack shows the bully punching and kicking the girl in the face while she lies on her back on the classroom floor.
A teacher in the classroom at the time did nothing to break up
the attack. While the victim was being beaten, the teacher
pressed a panic button to alert the school's emergency
administrators about the fight. From the cell phone video, it
appears that another student intervened to stop the bully’s
punches while the instructor is nowhere in sight.
“Where’s the teacher?” Eric Green, the victim’s father,
told KHOU. “Why didn’t they step in and do something about
this? Do something about this mess before it escalated into
physical confrontation?”
The school then proceeded to suspend both girls for participating
in a “mutual” fight, even though one girl was clearly
victimized by the other in what Mr. Green calls an
“assault”.
The assistant principal “basically told me we had two students
that got in a fight,” Green said. “We had mutual combat.’
That was it. She was being suspended. The other student was being
suspended.”
In a statement school administrators sent to NewsFix, a Cypress
Ridge High School spokesman defending the decision and said that
“the campus administration conducted an investigation and the
students involved were disciplined according to the Student Code
of Conduct.”
But the school’s response, together with the teacher’s failure to
break up the attack, has caused Green to develop grave concern
over the safety of his daughter at a place that's supposed to be
a safe learning environment.
“My concern is Cy-Ridge has no system in place to protect my
child while she’s in school,” he told NewsFix. “And it’s
not just my child. It could be anybody’s child.”
The cell phone video of the attack was uploaded to the Internet
several hours after the incident and after the suspensions were
in effect. The video evidence contradicts the “mutual”
altercation claims made by school administrators. It also
portrays the instructor’s lack of involvement, which could
reflect negatively on the school.
In North Carolina, a fight occurred between two seventh graders
at Hope Mills Middle School last week, with one student recording
it on her mobile phone camera. Kayla Echevvaria, the girl behind
the recording, was subsequently suspended for making the fight
public. Her mother believes the video served as an embarrassment
to the school, which prompted the suspension.
“I tried to explain to [an administrator] there were more
people than me just recording the fight and taking pictures, but
she basically said it didn’t matter because mine was the only one
that made it to the news,” the girl said.