Story Archive

Reading, ’Riting, and Rioting

“Everyone was screaming like stop, stop, stop,” says a student at Stone Mountain (Ga.) Middle School, after a knock-down, drag-out, hair-pulling fistfight in a classroom between a teacher and a paraprofessional, both 27 years old. The two women “were arguing about a teacher — a male teacher — and they started arguing and it went on for about three to five minutes,” another student says. Several students took video of the fight, but school administrators went through the students’ phones and forced them to delete them. “I think they were trying to push it under the rug so nobody would know about it and the school’s reputation wouldn’t be messed up,” said a student. But one girl apparently hid her phone, and her video made it to the news media. Once that was shown in public, the school announced it was firing both the teacher and the aide, who also have been criminally charged with disorderly conduct in a public place. “We will never tolerate such behavior in our schools,” district officials said in a statement. (RC/WGCL Atlanta, Atlanta Journal-Constitution) ...But they will tolerate school officials ordering students to destroy evidence in a criminal case.