Student who punched teacher in face in viral video, 2 other brawling students shouldn’t be ‘criminalized’: Superintendent

The Georgia high school student who punched a teacher in the face last week — an incident that was captured on a viral cellphone video — as well as two other brawling students seen in the clip should not be “criminalized,” the school district superintendent said Tuesday.

DeKalb County School District Superintendent Devon Horton said each of the three students who were charged with battery and disrupting public school has a story and there is “more to it than meets the eye,” Decaturish reported.

‘This was not as cut and dry as the video showed.’

“I am going to be honest. From what I’ve known as a superintendent regarding the situation, I do not support them being criminalized. I do not,” Horton told listeners at a news conference. “Every student deserves an opportunity … and there are some factors that we are aware of that could have prevented this, and so we’re looking into that right now.”

The fight took place last Tuesday at Martin Luther King Jr. High School in Lithonia, which is about 20 minutes southeast of Atlanta.

What happened prior to the on-camera violence isn’t clear, but the video begins with a male wearing a dark hoodie running up to a teacher wearing a jacket and tie and punching him in the face. As you might expect, onlookers in the hallway let out an approving holler in unison.

A security guard who’s right next to the teacher puts the attacker in a bear hug and attempts to move him away, but the angry teacher hits his attacker with a punch of his own, which the crowd doesn’t like one bit.

With that, two other males — one wearing a gray hoodie and the other wearing a white hoodie — go after the teacher and knock him to the floor. By this point, the frenzied students are behaving as if they’re watching a UFC match.

The teacher gets up again, and there’s a little bit of pushing and shoving, but that’s where the 45-second clip ends. You can view it here.

The district said in a statement that several students reportedly initiated the physical fight with the teacher, WXIA-TV reported. The teacher in question is on paid administrative leave, Decaturish said.

Horton said at least one of the students involved in the fight had been at the school for less than a month.

“To be honest, this was not as cut and dry as the video showed,” Horton added during the news conference, according to Decaturish. “There were some things that, as a system, that we could have done better.”

Horton said challenges and stressors that students and teachers face in and out of school combine to create “the perfect storm for an incident like that,” the outlet added.

Decaturish said Horton and other officials brought up a number of recently implemented restorative practice programs in the district that they say have resulted in better attendance and graduation rates, as well as fewer disciplinary incidents and suspensions at the high school.

You can view a video here showing school district officials discussing the incident at the news conference.

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