The video is pure chaos. A Montgomery High School student throws punches at another student’s head while crowds of students gather around to film. Campus supervisors try holding them back as other students start fights of their own. The episode occurred in early October.
In another video uploaded Sept. 5, a female student walks up from behind another girl and pulls her ponytail so hard that her head smashes into a pole, taking her to the ground.
And in yet another posted on Oct. 24, several boys can be seen fighting on the ground near lockers as one teacher tries to pull them off each other and another tries to stop others from filming.
The videos are among more than 100 accessed by The Press Democrat showing dozens of students, mostly from Montgomery High School but also from other Santa Rosa City Schools, fighting one another on or near school grounds.
The hair pulling, head kicking, face punching and tackling takes place across genders, races and ages in hallways, bathrooms, locker rooms, school parking lots and campus surroundings.
They are shocking displays of brutality among high school and middle school teens, some as young as 13, and they come as district officials, teachers and parents are struggling to grapple with an unprecedented wave of violence that resulted in the stabbing death of a student in an art class at Montgomery in March.
The death forced a districtwide reckoning, including calls for the reinstatement of police resource officers on campus. This school year, the district formed a task force to deal with the issue, but before they even had their first meeting, half a dozen new fight videos already had been posted.
The videos were uploaded to Telegram, an encrypted messaging service, to a group of 566 members. The channel has 117 videos of student fights taken from September 2022 to now. Some videos are of the same fights, but taken from a different perspective.
Since the start of school on Aug. 16, videos of 18 different fights have been uploaded.
Some show hoards of screaming students crowded into school breezeways as staff members rush to intervene, often caught between swings and sometimes being thrown to the ground. Other students can be seen surrounding, filming, coaching their friends or cursing out other students.
In an anonymous poll in the Telegram group asking which schools the participants attend; 77% of the 251 voters were from Montgomery, but there were also kids from all the Santa Rosa City Schools high schools including Ridgway, Piner, Maria Carillo, Santa Rosa and Elsie Allen. But two Santa Rosa schools in particular, Herbert Slater Middle School and the school it feeds into, Montgomery, have been thrust into the spotlight because of several recent incidents made public by police and school officials.
“Every day we sense there’s going to be a fight,” said Jaden Garcia, an eighth grader at Herbert Slater Middle School, the site of a melee last school year involving dozens of students and captured on video.
Garcia, who spoke to The Press Democrat in October, expressed sentiments shared by many of his fellow students at Slater who described being “on edge” constantly. Weekly violent incidents, including one shelter-in-place lockdown, have already marked their school year.
On Sept. 1, just two weeks into the school year, a campuswide lockdown was initiated after several older juveniles entered Slater’s campus, aiming to start a fight with a Slater middle schooler. Some of the juveniles were identified as Montgomery High School students.
Eighth grader Lisa Rodriguez was in gym class when the lockdown bells rang, and while she said she and her peers are no strangers to fights on campus; “Lockdowns? That’s another thing.”
Not a week after the lockdown, a Slater staff member overheard a 13-year-old student tell his friends he had a gun in his backpack, leading to a Santa Rosa police investigation where an unregistered firearm was found in possession of the student’s older brother.
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