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25% of students fail to show up at Carson High School following brawl
An empty classroom.
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25% of students fail to show up at Carson High School following brawl
About a quarter of students didn't show up to Carson High School the day after a 30-student brawl forced the school on lockdown, according to the Los Angeles Unified School District. Security was also beefed up.
Four students were hospitalized; police arrested three others after Wednesday afternoon's fight. LAUSD initially believed the violence to be racially-motivated, but later said it was not.
Students have claimed that an upstart tagging crew started the violence.
Carson High senior Kemet Okara says the fights broke out between two groups of students.
"I wouldn’t say that it’s racially involved," said senior Kemet Okara. "It’s more of a newer tagging crew on an older tagging crew."
About half of Carson High’s students are Latino, while the rest are African-American, Filipino and white.
Additional staff and about a dozen L.A. school police officers were sent to serve the 3,000-student campus on Thursday, but that was not enough to assuage some parents' concerns.
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Rosa Ruiz let her 11th-grade son stay home Thursday and is trying to transfer him to nearby Torrance. She says campus fights are common.
But civil rights activist Eddie Jones says parents shouldn’t be pushed to that point.
"We want the parents' kids to come here to school and get a good education without worrying about being bullied, harassed, or beat up," said Jones.
Jones recently made a request of L.A. Unified. It's a major one in these cost-cutting days; Jones wants LAUSD to increase student safety by putting video cameras in all district classrooms.
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