If there’s a Woodward and Bernstein Award for investigative journalism in high schools, we’d like to nominate The Red & Blue Review, the official student-run news organization of the Ralph C. Mahar Regional School District (redandbluereview.org/home), that broke the story by Mahar senior MaryAnne Prescott of Orange about online videos of high school fistfights, some of which apparently took place in Mahar bathrooms.
As reported last week by Greenfield Recorder Staff Writer David McLellan, Prescott’s story exposed an Instagram page containing more than 30 videos of fistfights between students, many on school grounds, as well as fights outside of school and at other high schools such as Athol and Gardner. In the videos, Prescott saw her own classmates fighting, or crowding around a fight as spectators, or filming with their cellphones. She recognized past classmates, too, and in another, teachers and the principal attempting to break apart a fight between two girls, who continued punching. Even more disturbing to Prescott were the comments by viewers, such as “Who do you think won?”
“I was disgusted by it,” she said.
So was Mahar Principal Scott Hemlin, whose attempts to take down the page were unsuccessful. “We wanted it removed,” Hemlin said. “It’s promoting violence.” Instagram was unable to abide by his request. In the age of social media, online content has the half-life of nuclear waste and is about as hazardous, stoking violence with every viewing, “like” and share.
So Hemlin and his staff took actions to ensure student safety, closing all but one of its bathrooms in the high school and middle school, implementing other rules like only three people being allowed in a bathroom at a time and posting teachers outside of bathrooms. In addition, Hemlin said he plans to hold a social media awareness night for parents, with the message that derogatory content of any kind leaves a lasting digital footprint that could make it harder for students to find jobs or housing in the future, not to mention getting into the college of their choice. Hemlin said he thinks educators are “slowly” starting to get the right messages across about social media, but more work needs to be done to ensure students don’t post things online that could damage reputations or inspire violence.
Mahar’s experience offers a lesson for the education community. “We’re just like every high school in America,” Hemlin said.
For her part, Prescott said she would like to see students own the problem. “Since the last senior class left, the culture has really gotten worse,” Prescott said. “It’s not the teachers’ fault, it’s the students’ fault, and it’s up to use to take back our school. It’s as simple as school spirit at football games and at basketball games.”
Estelle Cade of Greenfield recently wrote about school spirit at Sanderson Academy in the 1940s, saying, “It was certainly a simpler time. Our school lacked many material things, but school spirit was big, our teachers were excellent and we all made our way in the world as adults, each in our own way.”
Some 80 years later, social media is a genie that can never be put back in the bottle and school spirit seems to be one of its victims. But maybe Prescott’s onto something. Within an hour of her story’s release, Prescott revisited the Instagram page to find the videos were being deleted and the comments being “washed away.” Hemlin said that pieces like Prescott’s can effect change; in this case, her online story became part of the solution.
Prescott’s story is one in a series that the Review has published to shed light on and repair the school culture at Mahar, which, we acknowledge, is no different than school cultures everywhere. Other stories have investigated problems with school bathrooms, by Marlena Niedzwiecki and Sebastian Colon; injuries connected with cheerleading, by Megan Ward; mental health in schools, by Liam DiDonato, and “The New Face of Climate Change Activism,” by Jessica Wilson, to name just a few. Kudos to these students – they’ve got a future in journalism – and to faculty advisers Ian Bashaw and Matt Parsons.