Campus fighting
strikes 3 schools

Waipahu, Nanakuli and Waianae
high schools go on lock-down
after incidents over two days

Fights at three Leeward public high schools Thursday and yesterday resulted in campus lock-downs, the arrest of six students and an assault on a police officer, say Honolulu police and state education officials.

Five male students, ages 15 to 17, were arrested for disorderly conduct Thursday after school at Waipahu High as they attempted to "rush" another group of students on school grounds, said Honolulu police Capt. Randy Macadangdang.

One police officer was kneed by someone in the crowd as he arrested one of those students, Macadangdang said.

The injured officer was back at work yesterday, and no other injuries were reported.

Nanakuli and Waianae high schools both had lock-downs yesterday afternoon after fights broke out on their campuses, Department of Education spokeswoman Sandra Goya said last night.

Goya said that there is no indication that the separate fights are related to each other or to confrontations at Radford High School in Salt Lake last week. However, she said, school officials from throughout Oahu will meet next week to discuss campus security.

At Nanakuli the school was locked down from 11:50 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. yesterday after school personnel broke up a fight between two students that began on campus but moved off campus with an audience of a hundred or more students, Goya said.

One Nanakuli student was arrested by police, who remained on campus until school let out at 1:20 p.m., the normal time, she said.

At Waianae an incident about 1 p.m. yesterday involving three students escalated to include about 15 students, Goya said. Police were called to the school and worked with the staff to defuse the situation, she said. There were no arrests, but the school was locked down until the normal 2:45 p.m. release time.

"It's been a busy Friday," she said. "We've been fielding a number of calls."

The fights come less than a week after a fight among students after a Radford High School basketball game last Saturday.

Lingering animosity led to a lock-down at Radford Monday and extra security this week. The school expelled one student, suspended another and is considering giving students less free time on campus in response to the tensions.

The altercations at Waianae, Waipahu and Nanakuli appear to be unrelated to the Radford incident or to each other, Goya said.

Schools Superintendent Patricia Hamamoto, Deputy Superintendent Clayton Fujie, complex-area superintendents and Oahu principals will discuss the incidents at next week's meeting, Goya said.

Also, officials from the four schools are conducting their own investigations and reviewing their security procedures, Goya said.

School officials and parents have attempted to figure out what happened at Radford, "but nobody seems to know exactly what caused this," Radford Vice Principal Bob Frey said earlier this week.

Parents of some black students -- who make up about 11 percent of Radford's student body -- have complained that the school has a history of racial problems among students.

At Waipahu, Macadangdang said a message on a girl's shirt reportedly had something to do with the fight that developed there. The fight started as a confrontation between two girls, he said.

"There weren't any derogatory statements on the shirt," said Waipahu Vice Principal Todd Fujimori.

"We're going to have a big meeting to bring everybody together" who was involved in the incident, Fujimori said. "Our main goal is to have it safe for students on campus and out of campus and to learn some life lessons from what happened."

Students arrested Thursday at Waipahu were released to the custody of their parents, Macadangdang said. He did not know if they returned to school yesterday.

Students at Radford
rally to defend school

Radford High School cheerleader Nichole Taylor is used to shouting her support for her school, but she was doing it on her own time yesterday and she meant business.

"A lot of things being said these days are making Radford look bad, but they're not true. This is a great school!" she said.

She and more than 200 other students turned out for a honk-and-wave rally yesterday near Radford's entrance aimed at countering what many see as an undeservedly negative public image stemming from a brawl at the school last Saturday.

Parents of some black students have suggested that race might have been a factor in the violence.

But students hotly denied that Radford, which has one of the highest percentages of black students of any Hawaii high school, has a race problem.

"No way. I've never heard of any racist problems at our school," said Taylor, who is black.

Thanks in part to its location near Pearl Harbor and Hickam Air Force Base, Radford has one of the most diverse student populations in Hawaii. Military dependents -- many of them black or Hispanic -- make up 80 percent of the student body.

A male student was transferred from the school this week after using a racial epithet in a confrontation with a black student three days after the initial brawl.

But students who were on the scene last Saturday say the fracas stemmed more from headstrong youth than race, and that black students were also to blame.

"They weren't attacked because of their race. This is getting blown out of proportion," said Ramsey Feagai, a senior.

School Principal Robert Stevens said affiliations of underclassmen he terms "wannabe gangsters" might have played a part.

Low-level gang posturing rears its head every few years among underclassmen, but they typically abandon it as they get older "because they want to graduate," he said.

He also complained that Radford's academic achievements are often ignored. Radford is the only Hawaii public high school in the state to have met mandated targets on student test scores each of the past two years.

Parents, faculty, police and military representatives discussed the student unrest in a meeting yesterday, deciding to set up a special committee of each of the school's varied constituencies, including students.

"We want to increase the level of awareness and respect, but it should be kept in perspective that this was a small number of bad actors," said Air Force liaison Col. David Tom.