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A San Francisco student has been hospitalized after a brawl at an embattled local middle school.
KTVU reported Thursday that a 13-year-old boy is facing “life-threatening” injuries after an altercation with another student that took place Monday afternoon at Everett Middle School — a school in the Mission neighborhood that has faced a slew of high-level scandals in recent months. A spokesperson for San Francisco Unified confirmed the altercation in a statement to SFGATE.
“On Monday, two students unfortunately decided to engage in a physical fight with the encouragement of several of their peers,” said Everett principal Esther Fensel in a letter sent to parents Thursday provided to SFGATE. “During the altercation, one student got seriously hurt.”
Details about the altercation remain scant, Fensel said in the letter, because of the students’ age — but both students are currently at home. In the letter, Fensel said that this “major incident” is part of broader issues in the district and nationwide, including “an alarming and urgent rise in mental health concerns and behavioral incidents” nationwide and staffing shortages due to “unpredictable staff absences.”
“This exacerbates the challenges that urban public schools have faced for a long time — challenges that are rooted in societal issues that we must address together in community,” Fensel wrote.
Everett is among the highest-needs schools in the district. More than 65% of the majority-Latino student body is eligible for free or reduced lunch, according to federal data, while Mission Local reports the school has “more than 20 percent of students needing special education support.”
But this news follows a bombshell report in Mission Local about untenable conditions at the middle school, including allegations of teachers being physically injured by students and a dearth of support for parents and teachers from administrative staff in addressing these conditions. Mission Local reported that one teacher resigned after only working for two months at the school.
“We went to the district, had meetings with them,” Everett Parent Teacher Association co-chair Dheyanira Calahorrano told KTVU. “Nothing happened. Nothing changed.”
The mother of one student told the news station that, in a separate altercation, her child was “trying to defend himself” after being choked by other students.
This attack is reportedly the latest in a string of troublesome incidents. According to KTVU, parents allege that bullies target students whose families recently immigrated to the United States.
Other parents have said that this incident is the first they’ve heard of any violence at the school. Elizabeth Rood, who has a seventh grader at the school, told SFGATE that her daughter has “had a really different experience at the school than it seems like maybe some other other kids have been having.”
“When these things happen,” she said, “we are often not hearing about it firsthand from our kid, we’re hearing about it through the school.”
For Rood, the issues at the school stem from broader challenges that remain unaddressed.
“What we need right now are more resources, more people,” she said. “We need to figure out how we fill the vacancies in the district so that when teachers need to take a day off, they know that somebody is going to cover their classes. Those are the root issues that need to be solved.”
School principal Fensel will reportedly be departing from the school at the end of the school year.
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