Gilroy
– Two students have been suspended and recommended for expulsion
from Gilroy High School after misbehaving during a joint
school-police simulation of a crazed gunman entering campus and
taking hostages.
Gilroy – Two students have been suspended and recommended for expulsion from Gilroy High School after misbehaving during a joint school-police simulation of a crazed gunman entering campus and taking hostages.
The two recommendations for expulsion come in response to a drill that was chaotic and plagued by student infractions, students said. Students urinated in the corner of the room, built a fire, ransacked a teacher’s desk, ripped up books, stole belongings and threw various articles across rooms, students reported.
Eliminating this misbehavior is part of running drills, said Greg Camacho-Light, assistant principal of the high school.
“I knew it would be chaotic, I knew it wouldn’t be pretty, but that’s exactly what we wanted to see,” he said.
A Tale of Two Classes
As students scrambled to the classroom where their next class was scheduled or that were nearest to them – the alarm rang out while students were between classes – one room ended up with no teacher and most rooms ended up with teachers stuck with students they did not know, making it harder for them to keep order, said Mani Corzo, dean of students at the high school.
One such classroom, that of substitute teacher Vandi Siafa, had about 25 students a spate of incidents, said sophomore Adam Guajardo.
The first 15 minutes were relatively uneventful, he said. The class built a barricade against the locked door, pulled down the shades and turned off the lights.
“Next thing you knew, it got out of hand,” he said. “The guys in our class, they broke two tables, they peed in the corner of the class and someone threw up and someone threw Gatorade.”
While school administrators mentioned in preparations for the drill that, should students need to go to the bathroom during a real code red, they should not leave the rooom and instead should go to the bathroom in trash cans. However, the student who went to the bathroom during the drill did not urinate into a container and was laughing during the incident, Guajardo said. It was an obvious flaunting of the rules, he said.
“He shouldn’t have even thought about that,” he said.
The scene was echoed in the social studies teacher Jeremy Dirks’ room. Dirks was sick and the district did not supply a substitute, so about 60 students were holed up without a teacher, students said.
In addition to shouting profanity, students built a fire and threw desks around the room, said two juniors who wished to remain anonymous. The students then went threw Dirks’ desk and scattered his belongings.
“It was kind of chaotic,” said sophomore Nick Davis, who was in the room. “No one was cooperating.”
Cleaning Up the Mess
While the administration suspended two students and recommended them for expulsion, other students who committed infractions got away with it, said Corzo.
“We took care of the main two characters,” he said. The school could have punished “two, three more people, but nobody could can tell me anything else. We were hoping the teacher who was there could give us more of an idea of who was doing other things.”
During the course of their investigation, the school found out that one claim of misbehavior was false – the accused student was in a different room from where he was said to have misbehaved – and that another was the result of extenuating circumstances when a student with no record of disciplinary action threw up into a sink from the smell of urine in the room.
The punishment the school meted out will send a message to kids that misbehaving during a drill will not be tolerated, Corzo said.
To protect the suspended students, administrators would not identify them, their age or why they were suspended. However, it is likely that the students will not be coming back to the high school, administrators said.
Still Ahead of the Game
Negative incidents notwithstanding, the school is ahead of its peers in preparing students for a Code Red situation, said Camacho-Light.
“There is no educational code that says we have to do this,” he said.
There have been 206 student deaths as a result of shootings in or around schools in the past eight years, reported Youth Act, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that provides statistics to encourage debate and leadership among youth.
While this makes for a small percentage of students killed, there is still cause to run a drill, Camacho-Light said.
“I think in the tranquil communities, small communities, there probably isn’t a big push for that, but frankly that’s where I think we have to be most careful,” he said.
