More than a week after the food fight disrupted A lunch, administrators are still taking action against students who have been identified as being involved.
Students have been called out of class to speak with administrators and after being told that they have been identified as having taken part in the food fight, the students are being assigned weekend community service at the school.
“We have, the administrators, have looked around the building and we will have either cleaning out of beds from weeding of flower beds or trash that are along fence lines that are not picked up everyday that collect trash or any of the things that don’t require heavy labor or particular skills, just things that you can do, that’s why it’s called community service, it’s things that you can do without any particular skills or a lot of labor,” assistant principal Bruce Coachman said. “It’s mainly cleaning up the exterior of the building and the courtyard, maybe washing some tables in the courtyard, maybe moving some tables if they’re able to. Just kind of sprucing up some things that our custodians can’t keep up with because they have so many other things that they need to do.”
Some of those students that took part in the food fight are surprised they are just now seeing consequences for their actions.
“I think it’s a shock that I got called out today,” sophomore Sam Tillinghast said. “Earlier this day during third period Mr. Coachman called me down to his office and asked me if I had thrown anything in the food fight and of course I denied but later that day, after my lunch at about 12:15, he called me back down and watched the video and he gave me five days of lunch detention and three hours of community service on Saturday.”
Although it’s eight days after the food fight, students are still being identified through the school’s security footage and also through social media.
“The students were identified positively on our security cameras and also on a variety of social media,” Coachman said. “If we could positively identify that they were involved then we put them on a list and called them in and explained to them that they had been identified as being a part of it and almost all of them knew that they had and were ok and fessed up. We had a few that didn’t want to but for the most part they took the, what I consider, the responsibility for their actions.”
While being caught came as a shock to some of the students, many of them are accepting the consequences with little complaint.
“Depending on what we do and on whether it’s inside or out, I won’t really mind it,” Tillinghast said. “It’s not too early, it’s at 9 o’clock but I don’t expect it to be hard.”
In addition to the weekend clean-up, the students who took part in the food fight will also serve a week of lunch detention starting Monday.
“Lunch detention won’t be too bad because I’m going to be with all my friends who threw food so it’s going to be a pretty fun lunch,” sophomore Carl Loop said.
Even those these consequences are a week after the food fight itself, administrators expect this to be the end of the food fight series.
“If we found out or we’re able to identify student who were involved then we’ll continue to address those issue,” Coachman said. “We don’t expect students to come in and tell on people. We didn’t ask them to do that. If they wanted to they could if they felt that that would make things more fair but we certainly didn’t ask, we didn’t solicit and we didn’t tell anybody that they had to do that. So how much longer is dependent upon if we find out anything going forward but as far as I’m concerned, I don’t have any other information to go on so we have concluded this aspect of it.”
