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Videos of school yard brawls cause concerns about student safety
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BATON ROUGE - Videos of teens in Baton Rouge brawling at school have been posted on the internet and are raising concerns about school safety. The head of the East Baton Rouge Parish School System told The Investigative Unit the videos are "unacceptable".
The videos have all been uploaded to YouTube in the past month. Some are even categorized into playlists, broken down by the school and where the fight occurred. EBR Superintendent Warren Drake argues that dates associated with the videos only indicate when the videos were posted, not when they took place.
"The safety of our students is a very high priority for us," he explained. "Those students who are doing those kind of things are being dealt with discipline-wise to the point where if they continue to disrupt, they will either be suspended or expelled from school."
News 2's Brett Buffington spoke to a concerned mother who says the student who attacked her son is still enrolled at Tara High School. She didn't want to reveal her identity because she's worried for her child's safety but says he was attacked by one of the students in the clips.
"It's from the same child, and no one is doing anything," she claims.
She wants to know that her son won't be a target of camera-carting bullying while he's trying to get an education.
"I really don't want to send him back to school again," she says. "I wish that I could home school him."
Drake says he understands the mother's concerns and is now looking into her son's case.
"She's an angry parent, and if her son was attacked, I don't blame her," he said. "There are two sides to every story, but if her son was attacked, we're going to take care of that attacker."
The school system policy is to not talk publicly about student discipline, so they couldn't tell us if any of the students in the videos were punished.
The Superintendent says he hasn't seen the videos himself and declined to watch them when The Investigative Unit offered to show him. He also says he doesn't believe the videos accurately represent the behavior at East Baton Rouge Parish Schools.
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