School Fights

Jenna Marlow

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School fights are taboo to most teachers, especially at PHS. When an altercation occurs at school, students are pulled off each other and the witnesses are expected to go on with their day as usual. There are many reasons why a school fight could happen. The main reason for these fights at PHS is unresolved issues that go deeper than one may see. If an administrator sees issues between students, they do not passively try to resolve the issue; instead, the students get a write-up for a verbal or physical altercation. Students who are considered “troublemakers” almost always have deeper issues, such as a rough home life. Imagine yourself as a student who has to deal with going home to a stressful situation every day where your parents do not take care of you. For this student, coming to school already can be difficult, causing the student's bottled emotions to lash out at other students. As a result of this student's actions, the administration has nothing to offer but to send them to the office. This will make them find themselves back at home in the same place the frustration started. The students with a rough home life do not get the attention they need to be successful, so to help these students the school administration needs to start acting more compassionate towards these individuals. These students need help learning how to cope with the deeper issues they struggle with day to day. Granted, there are students who fight because they want attention, get dared by friends, or just because they can. These students don’t fight because of an unresolved conflict, they do it for the fun of it. Whatever may be the reasoning behind fighting, it still goes against school policy and has to be dealt with. However, students who do not deal with issues outside of school are not the reason protocol used to deal with altercations needs to be changed.

Every student spends eight hours a day, five days a week at school. If compassion can be found here, it makes school the perfect environment to make these changes. A way to show compassion to these “troubled students” would be for administrators to sit the student down after an altercation and talk to them about their reasoning behind the issue. By talking to other students, I found that many of them would prefer to walk outside or sit with a counselor to calm down instead of immediately being accused of starting a fight for no reason. If these changes were made, the memory of being cared about would stick with that student forever. This could be a memory that would always remind the student that school was a safe place when things were tough at home.