Students suspended, cited for battery and disturbance

By Sam Scott

Fremont High School parents and Sunnyvale community members are questioning the reaction of school officials and Sunnyvale police to a March 3 schoolyard boxing match.

FHS parents and community members met with police and FHS administrators on March 15 to discuss the suspension and citation of the 27 Fremont students involved in the incident.

Officials said all but two of the suspended students allegedly were spectators to the incident. The punishment has angered some parents and students, who called the punishment harsh and inconsistent.

Sunnyvale Police Captain Chuck Eaneff said on March 3, FHS administrators spotted a group of students watching two male students boxing on a FHS campus baseball field. Three officers, already on campus, responded to the incident, Eaneff said.

After breaking up the fight, Eaneff said the officers found the boys uncooperative

and unwilling to identify the students who had been wearing the boxing gloves. Eaneff said the students' reaction prompted the police to issue citations. Officers cited 25 of the students for disturbing the peace, and issued to citations for battery to the boys identified as the fighters.

School administrators then suspended the 27 students for the rest of the March 3 school day and the following Monday.

"If we're not allowed to get to the bottom of things informally, citations allow us to do it formally," Eaneff said. "Then we can sit down and find out why each student is involved and what we can do in the future."

School officials said on March 2, they had warned students that boxing on campus would not be allowed. Eaneff said even friendly fights can escalate into dangerous levels of violence. Spectators, he said, can make it worse, inflaming emotions of those involved.

However, Miguel Flores, a student supervisor at Fremont, said he wonders why, if boxing is so dangerous, an officer broke up a previous match at FHS earlier this school year without issuing citations.

Eaneff said students involved in the first match were willing to talk and cooperate with police, allowing the officer to ascertain the fight was in sport. Students' close-lipped reactions to police on March 3 denied officers the chance to draw the same conclusion, Eaneff said.

But Flores said the students in the first match were also uncooperative. He said he knew this because he was the one who broke up the incident and called for backup to deal with the uncooperative students.

Flores said he wonders if the students involved in the incident earlier this year benefited from being a racially-mixed group. He said the students involved on March 3 were Hispanic, many of whom spoke little English.

"I vividly remember [the first time] that officer saying boys will be boys," Flores said. He said the boys involved on March 3 were dealt with like criminals.

"I am very, very angered by their treatment," he said. "I never seen anything like this in 23 years with the district."

His concerns were echoed by a March 17 editorial in the FHS student newspaper, The Phoenix.

"We. . . believe the police over-reacted and made their decisions based upon the preconceived notion that these Latinos are gang members," wrote Ghe Vong, a Phoenix staff member. Vong said the paper's view of the incident was shaped by the difference in punishments assessed those involved in the separate boxing matches.

Eaneff and FHS Principal Pete Tuana, however, said they believe the reaction was appropriate for the situation. Eaneff said the situation might have been handled differently if the officers had been able to figure out what was going on. Without that ability, they rightly issued citations, he said. Police did not factor race into either incident, he said.

Tuana said providing Fremont students a safe learning environment is his most important job as principal. "It is much better that we sitting here talking about this than talking about people seriously injured," he said.

Tuana added that he took the concerns of the boys' parents and others very seriously. He said he wished things had gone differently, though he sees this an opportunity to make a connection with the school's Hispanic community. His agenda for the March 15 meeting, he said, was to build a bridge between the parents of the boys and the school

"I want to find how we can work together to make sure they have a better alliance with the school," he said.

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