Lack of discipline and extreme in-school violence have led many Baltimore parents to host a “stop school violence” to raise awareness about the lack of student safety at school.
After multiple videos have gone viral showing students brawling in the middle of the school hallways, parents have had enough and want an end to the lack of accountability that administrators display.
In one video, a teacher is seen in the middle of a group of students who are exchanging punches.
In another, there is another massive brawl that can be seen as students cheer on the chaos.
Amy Adams, the Baltimore Country Parent and Student Coalition President, spoke to Fox News about the concerning situation. “We were hoping this year would be a better, more stable environment within the school, but the issues are persistent as evidenced by the extremely disturbing videos,” said Adams.
At the start of this semester, a viral video showing a high school student using a baseball bat to fight other students surfaced.
It appeared from news coverage surrounding the video that the student used the bat to defend herself from a group that jumped her, but that is still unclear.
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“Kids are not held accountable and people run wild; the kids run wild,” said Baltimore County resident Garry Guio in an interview with WMAR Baltimore.
“They got fights down here all the time and it’s out of control and nobody’s doing anything to stop it,” he said. “If they just suspend these kids that are causing a problem and get them out of the school, that will send a message to the other people that want to make trouble because there’s a lot of students that just want to learn.”
Baltimore Country Public Schools Superintendent Darryl Williams says that these claims of increased and unpunished violence are false.
“The intolerable action of 8.2 percent of students who have engaged in fights and other aggressive behaviors this school year create the impression that violent behavior is the norm and accepted in our schools, and that there are no consequences for aggressive behavior,” said Williams. “That is categorically false.”
Amy Adams has a different view on the amount of accountability in schools.
“The school system’s responses to this point have been minimal,” she began. “They attempt to dismiss our concerns as a ‘false narrative’ and use data to show that incidents are decreasing but we hear from staff that many incidents are not documented so how accurate is the tracking data?”
Many parents are also upset that the school board’s town hall events are still being held virtually, even when in-person meetings are a possibility.
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan said that this issue is outrageous and that schools need to get their act together.
“It’s outrageous,” Hogan said. “We put hundreds of millions of dollars into the schools specifically for school resource officers.”
Hogan told Fox 45 that believes that schools need to have more school resource officers to be able to curb this rampant violence.
“Our point is that children should not be getting to the point of beating each other up in the hallways,” says the Baltimore Country Parent and Student Coalition.
By: Goose