Three Ribault High School students are being arrested for battery after videos of two incidents on Friday started making the rounds on the internet.
One video shows students pushing and attacking an administrator, another video captured the same day shows students damaging the principal’s car.
Duval County School Police Department Chief Wayne Clark said a 14-year-old male student and 15-year-old male student have been arrested for battery on a school official with a third arrest and same charge expected for a 17-year-old female.
“We’ve increased our police presence around the school,” Clark said. “We’ll be here all this week and we’ll reevaluate at the end of the week to what we will do next week to make sure the school is safe and secure for the students.”
A video shows administrator Dwayne Thomas being pushed backward and then some students attacking him after he tried to breakup a fight. The incident happened in the stands after a homecoming pep rally.
The videos are separate incidents occurring near the same time after the rally.
Law enforcement and district officials addressed the incidents during a press conference Monday.
Principal Christopher Jackson said Thomas is OK, and Tuesday students will be going to assemblies to talk about what happened Friday.
“(We’ll be) Sharing with them the nature of the code of conduct violations that occurred, the consequences that come with that and the importance of making the right choices all the time,” Jackson said.
Duval Superintendent Patricia Willis says she was disheartened by the videos because a safe learning environment is a primary function of the district.
“When you see this on a school campus usually it’s a very small percentage of students when things like this occur,” Willis said. “What we want to do is try to work with those students and meet their needs but certainly that we send a message that this is not representative of the entire student body of a school.”
Jackson recounted a guardian of one of the arrested teens in tears and apologizing after learning of the incident.
“She said ‘this is not how he was raised, we’ve done everything we could at home,’ and that’s what we need from our parents,” Jackson said.
School Board Chair Paula Wright, who represents Ribault in her district, said she wants to send a strong message to the community that physical attacks or harm to faculty and staff won’t be tolerated.
“We all send our children to our schools to be educated and we want everyone to understand that, be it student to student, or student to adult, physical harm is not acceptable and will not be tolerated,” Wright said.
Investigations are still underway in the second incident and Jackson says his car damages are minor. He says in the future pep rallies might be incentive based.
Lindsey Kilbride can be reached at lkilbride@wjct.org, 904-358-6359 or on Twitter at @lindskilbride.
