Students at one of America’s most violent high schools — where administrators begged for the National Guard to help reign in campus chaos — are organizing fight clubs, The Post has learned.
Meanwhile, overwhelmed teachers at Brockton High School, 25 miles south of Boston, are turning a blind eye to the violence out of fear for their own safety after multiple staffers were brutally beaten while trying to stop fights.
“Out of boredom the kids are setting up fights between two individuals, and they’re setting up a location for them to fight, and everybody’s going to watch it,” said Jamal Gooding, a Brockton, Mass., activist who has been speaking with parents and students since the beleaguered school made headlines earlier in February.
Gooding told The Post that those fights are sparking even more violence in the hallways — and risk turning deadly.
“What happens when you lose the fight and you go to school next day? That’s when you let your friends come in the back door and get the person that beat you up,” he said.
“They’re not dealing with fisticuff fights, like we did in our generation. No, if you lose, now you want to go to weapons.”
Cliff Canavan, a Brockton High math teacher of 22 years, hadn’t heard about fight clubs, but told The Post “it wouldn’t necessarily surprise me” if they were happening, as brawls are commonplace in the halls of the school.
Canavan, who had his arm broken last school year while stopping a beat-down in which an unconscious student was being kicked in the head, said the violence has become so aggressive that he and many of his colleagues have stopped trying to intervene for their own safety.
“If I’m in the hallway and a fight breaks out, I’m not getting involved. I’m turning around and walking the other way. Because I’m not going to put myself in a position to get seriously injured again,” he said.
Canavan’s injuries were just one in a long list Brockton teachers have suffered — and relatively minor compared to some attacks on faculty.
“A friend of mine that was a science teacher… he had a fight break out in front of his classroom several years back. And he got knocked to the ground and hit his head so hard that he actually wound up with internal damage in his brain area,” Canavan said.
“He will never be able to work again as a teacher. He’ll never be to, as far as I know, never drive a car again. He walks around with those deep, deep tinted sunglasses that like a you see an elderly person wearing, because if he doesn’t he winds up with splitting headaches from regular light. That’s horrific.”
Another teacher ruptured three disks in his back when he was knocked over breaking up a fight, and was put out of work for the entire year, Canavan said.
And, a hall proctor who was seven months pregnant was shoved into a wall by a student she was escorting for discipline.
“He turned to her and shoved her up against the wall, slammed her in the wall. After she went out on maternity leave she didn’t return to Brockton,” the teacher added.
During an emergency school committee meeting in February, Canavan and a number of other teachers described the chaos they face on a daily basis trying to wrestle control over the 3,500 students who roam the halls of Brockton High.
They reported witnessing students getting into fights, dealing and doing drugs, and according to one teacher, “having sex” in empty classrooms.
Recent budget shortfalls and layoffs — about 120 district teachers were fired last year, according to Canavan — have left the school severely understaffed. Those who remain are powerless to maintain order, he said.
In a desperate measure, four members of the Brockton School Committee officially asked Brockton’s mayor and Gov. Maura Healey to dispatch troops from the National Guard to help quell the trouble.
Healey declined to send the Guard, instead allocating funds for a safety audit, but Canavan said the move was incredibly effective in making people look at the problem.
“When I first had my arm broken, I was so frustrated by the situation and not getting the support that I needed that I sent pictures and a description of what happened to a variety of local news agencies,” Canavan said. “And I didn’t even get a single call or email. And now all of a sudden everybody wants to talk to me.”
Effective as it might have been in drawing attention, Canavan called involving the National Guard “foolish” and a “short term solution,” citing a 2012 Massachusetts school discipline law — Chapter 222 — that he said started the trouble, and would prevent the Guard from taking any real action.
Chapter 222 requires that suspensions be used only as a “last resort” in disciplining students. Critics say it forces teachers and administrators to go through arduous bureaucratic steps before they can effect meaningful discipline.
“It handcuffs or hamstrings the administration’s ability to effectively discipline students,” Canavan said. “It’s gotten to the point now where the worst behaved kids are feeling more enabled than anything else. Because the consequences, they don’t feel, are effective.”
Gooding, the Brockton activist, is a born and raised Bostonian who grew up in the shadow of the state-sanctioned desegregation of the city’s public school system in the 1970s and the violence that ensued. He also agreed that the National Guard was not the answer — especially in one of the most diverse cities in New England.
Brockton High School’s student body is 61% black, 18% Hispanic and 13% white.
“There’s a lot of distrust within the community, with anybody with a gun,” Gooding said, referring to both police and members of the Guard.
“One of the things we’re hearing from these young adults right now is psychological trauma that they’re going through daily,” he said.
During a city meeting on Tuesday, Gooding offered to send 50 volunteers from his non-profit, People Affecting Community Change, to help with the situation instead of outside forces like the National Guard. Gooding said bringing in people from the community will be vital in solving the real problems causing the trouble at Brockton High. He still has not heard back on the offer.
Canavan, meanwhile, believes the solution is for the school to push back on Chapter 222, and to ban phones during the school day — which he believes have helped students to stoke violence and organize retaliation on social media.
Despite the grisly headlines surrounding Brockton High, Canavan and Gooding both emphasized that the great majority of students are not the problem.
“The negativity that’s been happening around Brockton should not overshadow the huge success we have with a lot of those students, and producing some great graduates that go off to college, or trade school,” Canavan said, noting that 95% of the students are “great kids that do the right thing on a regular basis.”
“We’re trying to do what’s right for them, because they deserve it.”
But while the troubles go unresolved, more and more of those good kids are continuing to leave the school every year. Brockton high typically has an enrollment of about 4,300 students, Canavan said, but in his 22 years at the school the student body has reached an all time low.
“A good portion of that is because of parents choosing to send their kids to districts near Brockton, but not in Brockton. Because they don’t trust having their children at the high school,” the teacher said.
https://nypost.com/2024/03/03/us-news/brockton-high-students-organize-fight-clubs-at-mass-school/
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