9486 in the collection
Report Says Principal Put Students in Cage to Fight
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By Gretel C. Kovach
DALLAS — A high school principal and his
security staff shut feuding students in a steel
cage to settle disputes with bare-knuckle
fistfights, according to an internal report by
the Dallas Independent School District.
The principal of South Oak Cliff High School,
Donald Moten, was accused by several school
employees of sanctioning the “cage fights”
between students in a steel equipment enclosure
in a boy’s locker room, where “troubled” youth
fought while a security guard watched,
according to the confidential March 2008 report
first obtained by The Dallas Morning News.
Such fights occurred several times over the
course of two years, the report said.
Mr. Moten, who resigned from the district in
2008 while under investigation in connection
with a grade-changing scandal, denies the cage-
fight accusations.
“That’s barbaric,” he told The Dallas Morning
News. “You can’t do that at a high school. You
can’t do that anywhere. It never happened.”
But investigators with the district’s Office of
Professional Responsibility gathered testimony
from two employees at South Oak Cliff High who
said they had witnessed students fighting in
the cage from 2003 to 2005, among others who
heard about the fights.
One employee overheard Mr. Moten tell a
security guard to take two students who had
been at each other for days and “put ’em in the
cage and let them duke it out,” the report
states, and the practice was so embedded in the
school’s culture that one student remarked to a
teacher that he was “gonna be in the cage.”
The district is on spring break, and officials
did not return calls for comment.
Mr. Moten, 56, is a former Dallas police
officer who once lied about being kidnapped and
robbed at gunpoint to get out of work, for
which he was placed on administrative leave.
The district uncovered the cage-fight
accusations while investigating a scandal that
forced South Oak Cliff to relinquish its 2005
and 2006 state boys basketball championship
titles.
The district found that Mr. Moten had pressured
teachers to change the failing grades of
athletes so they were eligible to play.
Corporal punishment is permitted in some
states, but school-sanctioned fistfights as a
means of conflict resolution is virtually
unheard of, said Dr. Joan F. Goodman, an expert
in school discipline at the University of
Pennsylvania School of Education.
“Schools need to think much more carefully
about how they can find outlets, socially
appropriate outlets, for aggression,” Dr.
Goodman said. “But to just go into a room and
slug it out until someone wins, that’s
obviously condoning violence, and the school
has no business condoning violence. If kids
think this kind of behavior is encouraged, it
could spread.”
Frank Hammond, a former counselor at South Oak
Cliff who was fired and filed a whistle-blower
lawsuit, said that the cage fights were common
knowledge, but that he did not report them to
the district at the time because he knew
nothing would be done.
The district referred the matter to its police
force, the report states, but no charges have
been filed.
A school-based fight club runs counter to the
last decade or more of research into school
discipline, said Dr. Russ Skiba, who directed
the Safe and Responsive Schools Project at
Indiana University.
“We’ve found over time that those types of
strategies just don’t work,” Dr. Skiba said.
“They are more likely to encourage aggression
than to solve it.”
— Gretel C. Kovach
New York Times
2009-03-20
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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