A Northern Lehigh school director has urged the school district to look into a policy to protect students following the latest incident in which a student was physically assaulted.

After a girl suffered a concussion during a fight last Wednesday night during Trick or Treat in Walnutport, Director Angela Williams urged the board to act at Monday’s school board committee meeting, and noted she’s been doing some research on a self-defense policy.

“I do realize that most schools don’t have a self-defense policy,” Williams said. “But I do believe we should discussing the bullying that is happening here in our community.”

Williams noted that last month at a committee meeting they had discussion about a student getting attacked “and they were reprimanded because they defended themselves.

“This past week, I’m sure most of you know, another young teenager got attacked by a bunch of students,” she said. “I mean, two attacks in two months.”

“And I understand this attack did not happen on school grounds, during school hours, it’s concerning. I really think we need to look at our zero tolerance policy.

Williams questioned, “At one point do you allow somebody to beat you up?

“I just don’t understand how you cannot defend yourself and when you do you get in trouble,” she said. “I mean it breaks my heart.”

Williams added, “I’m listening to the community, I’m listening to the students and the parents that ‘my kid got punched in the stomach and just stood there’, At what point does a child just have to say, ‘I don’t want to get hit no more.’”

“You have to be able to defend yourself without getting in trouble. Nowadays, I believe we have video, people are taping it, you can see if somebody was innocent or not.”

A student defending himself could risk suspension. Williams said the district’s bullying policy is not working. “We need to try to do better,” she said. “I don’t know what the answer is, but I feel if a student needs to fight back, they should have the right to. And what are we teaching our student, especially a young lady, not to fight back so now she becomes an adult, and she gets attacked at her car, and she’s not supposed to fight back.

Williams said innocent students must be protected.

Wiliams added, “At some point some parents are going to really step up and start fighting, start fighting back.”

Handbooks

Superintendent Dr. Matthew J. Link said they’ve been talking about this since last month.

“We can look at policies, but I really think the work that’s going to affect the change is actually going to be in the handbook level,” Link said. “Because remember the handbooks are board approved, so if you would like us to put in potential revised language, we’ll bring it back here, and then those handbooks would have to be approved again, or an addendum would have to be approved for the handbooks, and we could bring back a continuum from current language to where there’s a lot of leeway with how it could be addressed through a discipline lens.

“We’ve actually been having as recently as (Monday), these conversations, but we also want to make sure that whatever language we put in there captures the intent of. We don’t want it to be that anything goes.”

Williams said people have videos, and added, “Eventually when there is an attack you need to look at that.

Link said they will aim to bring revisions for January.

The policy

Board President Mathias Green said, “I don’t want to see a policy that’s so restrictive or so defining that our administrative team that I have a lot of faith and confidence in cannot do what they need to do to uphold what is happening.

“I don’t want to tie their hands to the point where they just have to let riots go on in the hall and aren’t able to do anything because “I’m just defending myself,” I don’t want to swing a policy too far that restricts our people from doing their job.”

The attack

Borough police Chief Jason Nothstein said that based on what they’re being told and observed on video, there were five offenders who were involved in the incident.

He said one girl went to the hospital to get checked out and was found to have a concussion.

Nothstein said those who were involved in the incident are all juveniles.

He said the police department was initially dispatched at 7:40 p.m. to Main Street and Lehigh Street.

However, Nothstein said the actual incident itself occurred on Lehigh Gap Street and Birch Street.

The police department posted on its Facebook page last week Thursday they were advised that there are multiple videos circulating around of the incident.

The police department asked anyone who has a video of the incident to contact the department through its dispatch center at Lehigh County Communications Center at 610-437-5252, or email Nothstein at jnothstein@walnutportpolice.org.

Nothstein previously said it was an isolated incident between kids that have had problems with each other for many months now, and added the incident remains under investigation.