Eight girls at Sinaloa Middle School in Novato were arrested this week in connection with a schoolyard beating that injured two students on Friday.
The students, who are between 12 and 14 years old, were booked into Marin County juvenile hall on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a crime and felony assault, Novato police Sgt. Alan Bates said.
Bates said the teens who were arrested would be processed through the juvenile justice system. Juvenile hall staff said Wednesday they could not disclose whether the students were still in custody or released to their parents because their records are confidential due to their ages.
The two injured students sustained moderate injuries and were treated at an area hospital and released, Bates said. One student, the target, was punched repeatedly while a crowd of students looked on, some shooting videos of the attack on their cellphones and posting them on social media.
The other student was injured when she tried to intervene, according to Christy Stocker, school principal.
Stocker and a team of school and Novato Unified School District administrators spoke to more than 200 Sinaloa Middle School parents at a community forum Tuesday at the school library. Parents of the two injured students told the group that their children were physically OK, but shaken emotionally.
“This was a horrific attack,” Tracy Smith, district superintendent, told the parents. “It’s completely unacceptable and will not be tolerated.”
The school and the district have hired extra security personnel and administrative staff over the next two weeks until school ends June 13. The school is also paying teachers to hold classrooms open during lunch periods if students want to stay inside and be protected instead of circulating out in the schoolyard.
Staff are also being posted at the entrances to each school bathroom.
“We are doing everything we can to keep our kids safe,” Julie Synyard, Novato Unified executive director for educational services, told parents.
Stocker told parents the school is banning the use of cellphone cameras to shoot videos, unless the students are sending evidence anonymously to the STOPit app, which connects with the police department.
“From here on out, any filming on campus will have harsh consequences,” Stocker told parents.
She urged parents and students to keep the school and police aware of any threats or disturbances either through the STOPit app or by emailing her at [email protected]. Smith said parents may also reach her at [email protected].
Bates said police are still investigating the motive for the attacks using the broad theme of “schoolyard tension,” he said.
“Obviously we will keep digging into what caused it,” Bates said. “At this time, we are confident it was not gang-related, not a hate crime and not racially motivated.”
Parents at the forum on Tuesday loudly rebuked school officials for failing to ward off the attack Friday, even though they knew it was brewing at least a day in advance. On Thursday, the school was able to thwart a first attempt by sending one of the instigators and the target student home.
Unaware of the school’s actions to prevent an incident, a huge mob of dozens of students roamed the campus on Thursday looking for the fight, but were unable to find it.
On Friday the mob of students repeated the plan, and were successful in finding and attacking the target student just before the end of lunch period bell at 1 p.m.
The attack lasted 17 seconds until adult school personnel rushed in to break it up, Stocker said.
“We had staff 20 yards away, on either side,” John Matern, an assistant principal, told parents. “We were everywhere, but right there.”
Novato police Capt. Sasha D’Amico said one of the two school resource officers assigned to Novato Unified School District responded to the attack after receiving a video of it on the STOPit app.
The officer rushed to the campus and called in the incident to the police department.
D’Amico said the police department was not contacted directly by the school. She had no word on why the school hired two extra private security guards on Friday but did not arrange for the two school resource officers to be present.
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According to Synyard, “the team followed routine protocols for dealing with a campus issue,” she said in an email.
“Based on the investigation that occurred on Thursday afternoon, the administrative team believed that there was no evidence that warranted a call to the school resource officer,” she said.
“Additional support staff was brought to campus including North Bay Security employees,” Synyard added. “Out of an abundance of caution, additional staff was deployed at the site.”
After the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the many months of anti-police protests across the country that followed, Novato Unified School District was one of several Marin school districts to examine its campus police presence.
The district and other Marin schools spent months trying to hammer out a compromise on how to keep students safe, while also avoiding potential intimidation of students of color or other marginalized student populations.
At Novato Unified, after a lengthy citizens committee process, the SROs’ presence was somewhat reduced by eliminating on-campus offices for the resource officers. However, the district chose to maintain a partnership with the police department and the two school resource officers.
Long-time district teacher Liz Nelson told parents Tuesday that the broader issue was that educators and schools are being challenged to catch up with a new generation of students raised on cellphones and social media — and violence such as school shootings.
“Schools have changed, times have changed, children have changed,” said Nelson, who has been at the district for 29 years. “We’re working so hard, all day long, sitting in circles, seeing what we can do.”
Nelson told parents it is “not just us, not just you,” she said. “We are a community, all of us,” she said. “We need you to help us.
“We live for this job — your kids are our kids — we love them,” she added, to applause from the parents. “We’re going to keep going until we see some change.”
