English principal suspends 27 for videotaped fight

LYNN – Thomas Strangie, principal of English High School, suspended the two girls who engaged in a brutal videotaped fight for five days, and also issued lesser suspensions to all the other students who either encouraged the girls to keep fighting or videotaped the fight.Strangie said Monday he met with all 27 of the students involved right after homeroom Monday morning and handed out the suspensions.”I can honestly say they were quiet and they were attentive, and they didn’t say one word,” Strangie said about the meeting.He pointed out that he mentioned to the suspended students an incident involving an 11-year-old girl in California who died Friday after a school-yard fight between her and another girl.”This could have been us. The story could have been much worse,” Strangie said.The suspensions start today, Strangie said.The Daily Item first broke the story about the video of what appears to be a planned fight, which took place on Feb. 15 after school at the nearby Cook Street Park.The video shows two girls fighting while other students – including many with cell phones in hand who moved closer to better videotape the fight – watch as the bigger of the two girls smashes the smaller girl’s head into a stone wall at the park.The bigger girl also appears to knee the smaller girl in the face while she’s on the ground, and the two exchanged repeated blows to the face during the fight, which was stopped and started multiple times, but only ended for good when police responded to the park.Strangie suspended the rest of the students for one to three days, depending on their involvement in the incident.”I was outraged by the whole thing,” Strangie said about the incident. “To think that people would stand around and watch this ? that they would get any kind of thrill watching two female students batter each other.”Strangie noted the incident “intensified a bad reputation” the schools have outside the city because of the “actions of a few.””I would just stress that this is just 27 kids out of 1,700 and this is not what the school is all about,” Strangie said.He acknowledged his surprise that officials hadn’t heard about the fight.”I was pretty shocked, normally if things are going to happen, we’ll get a tip about it and head it off before it happens,” Strangie said.The suspended students will not be allowed to return to school until they, along with at least one of their parents, meets with administrators, Strangie said.”They know what the policy is,” Strangie said about the students who were suspended. “Not one kid was surprised that they were being punished.”Strangie also plans to hold an assembly this morning to talk to the entire school about what happened and how dangerous the fight was.”Those girls could have been severely injured,” he said.Strangie also lamented the way the Internet and YouTube have changed this generation of teenagers.”School fights have been going on for decades, but I think this whole idea that this generation has become a voyeur society, where every movement you make can be videotaped and go online, it’s just become pretty horrifying,” he said.Strangie urged parents to “be forever vigilant,” because the phones their children are carrying have become their “portal to the world.”Strangie said the fight happened despite the school’s anti-bullying program and peer mediation program, which includes 30 students acting as teen mediators.”The school does not ignore things, we try to be proactive,” Strangie said.Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy also said during an afternoon press conference in her office that the suspended students must write an essay based on the 1964 murder of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese, who was stabbed and sexually assaulted in an alley near her house. Although 38 people heard the attack, no one did anything to help.”I want them to learn about the consequences of apathy. I want them to see the potential consequences of doing nothing,” Kennedy said Monday.Kennedy said she was appalled that students