District: Late word on melee intolerable

Strawberry Mansion High School disciplined students involved in a cafeteria melee captured on video that was posted on YouTube.com last month, but did not report the fight to the district until yesterday.

Likewise, school administrators did not follow the district's discipline policy in two other recent incidents - one involving a box cutter and the other an assault on a school police officer.

"We will not tolerate failure to report serious incidents or failure to report them in a timely fashion," Tom Brady, the district's interim chief executive officer, said in a statement yesterday.

The district will take "a number of steps to make clear to principals and other staff what is expected of them when it comes to reporting serious incidents that occur on or around school property," he said.

Jack Stollsteimer, a state-appointed official who monitors safety in Philadelphia schools, said this week that such lapses were part of a larger pattern of failure in the district's disciplinary system.

The fight at Strawberry Mansion gained the most notoriety because of the video's appearance on YouTube.com and on 6ABC's Action News Wednesday.

District officials began investigating the clash at the North Philadelphia school when they learned of the video Tuesday.

District spokesman Fernando Gallard said officials had determined that the fight occurred at 12:45 p.m. Dec. 12. Three 10th-grade girls and one ninth-grade girl were suspended. The ninth grader and one of the 10th graders also were transferred Dec. 20 to Boone, one of the district's disciplinary schools.

The Strawberry Mansion administrators "did the proper thing at the school level and did the paperwork to get the students suspended and out of the school," Gallard said, "but they failed to file their incident report until" yesterday.

"That is a violation of the discipline policy," he said.

Once the district has completed its investigation, it could take disciplinary action against school administrators, Gallard said.

State law and the federal No Child Left Behind Act require schools to report serious incidents. The district uses the information to address violence inside its schools.

Lois Powell-Mondesire, principal at Strawberry Mansion, did not return several phone messages left at her office.

Students outside Strawberry Mansion after dismissal yesterday did not want to talk about the fight - or the video.

"It makes our school look bad!" one girl said as she hurried down the sidewalk through the falling snow.

In one of the other two incidents that surfaced yesterday, a student at Harrison Elementary School in North Philadelphia was found with a box cutter last Friday, and Philadelphia police were called. The serious-incident report to the district was filed Monday.

But Gallard said Brady was deeply troubled to find that the report said that "no arrest was made due to the request of the regional office not to arrest."

Gallard said that was clearly a violation of state law.

"If a weapon is brought into the school, the police are called, and they make the determination," he said.

While city police do not arrest children younger than 10, this child was older, Gallard said.

The assault of a school police officer by a student happened Dec. 4 at T.M. Peirce Elementary School in North Philadelphia. Police arrested the student, but the principal did not file a report.

District officials learned of the incident Monday while reviewing juvenile-arrest data provided by the Police Department.

"Again, the appropriate action was taken in regards to calling the police," Gallard said, "but they failed to follow the final step and report it to our incident report desk."

This week, Stollsteimer sharply criticized the Sharswood School in South Philadelphia for failing to file a serious-incident report about a student assault last month and for not removing the student who committed the assault from the school.

He also criticized officials at Blaine Elementary School for not contacting police Dec. 10 when two weapons were confiscated from students. The police were notified later of the 5-inch kitchen knife and were told of another student who had tried to stab a classmate with scissors.

Principals and regional superintendents received a Jan. 8 memo from chief academic officer Cassandra W. Jones spelling out the district's policy.

Brady said yesterday that regional superintendents would be trained Tuesday and would use a previously scheduled meeting next Friday to train all principals.