Dist. 203 breaks up ‘fight club’

A group of Jefferson Junior High School students who organized a fight club, aiming to be the next YouTube sensation, has been punished, Naperville Unit District 203 officials said Tuesday.

Spokeswoman Susan Rice said eight or nine students received and served suspensions in mid-March after holding early morning “fight clubs” in a washroom just outside the boys’ locker room.

“We chalk this up as a case of these boys being influenced by the culture around us,” Rice said. “We believe this was a group of friends who started this outside of school and in unsupervised areas, but they began to test the boundaries and brought it into the school.”

Ultimately it was school resource officer Michaus Williams who noticed a student with a black eye before classes one day that led district officials to the fighting. But Rice said several parents said, after the fact, they also were noticing unusual behaviors by their sons.

“When this was brought to the parents’ attention, they acknowledged noticing changes in their children’s’ behavior, like early morning phone calls and increased text messages,” Rice said. “But they didn’t think it was serious enough to investigate further.”

She said officials believe the students organized in school for only a few days, but she doesn’t not know how long the club met off school grounds.

Shortly after Williams observed the black eye, other school officials began to notice “skittish” behavior around the locker room.

“They had lookouts in key locations so if someone came from the school side they could disperse into the locker room and onto the field,” Rice said. “And if someone came from the field, the students could disappear into the hallways.”

Rice said one of the students recorded the fights on his cellphone and posted them to YouTube. The footage was confiscated and shown to parents of the students. The parents of the videographer, Rice said, immediately removed the footage from the site.

“The video showed your typical punches and fighting but thankfully no serious injuries,” Rice said.

District officials said they received full cooperation from parents and the involved students and decided to take disciplinary action through the district once police indicated there were no victims.

Rice said all the boys were in the club voluntarily and no one was seriously injured as a result of the fights.

Rice said she could not say what discipline the boys received because of student confidentiality. But she said the punishments in cases such as this range from detention to expulsion.

“Varying levels of discipline were handed down based on each student’s level of involvement,” she said.

Jefferson Principal Nancy Voise waited until Tuesday, when the district began receiving media inquiries, to inform the rest of the school community about what happened.

“During (Williams’) investigation he determined that no students were coerced into participation,” Voise wrote. “It is for this reason that we felt this was an incident that concerned only the families involved.”

Rice said no further fights have occurred on school grounds since the unofficial club was broken up and school officials have secured entrances to the locker room areas before and after school.