My high school is not a bad place

THE FIGHT and students’ recording of it were deplorable, and force us to ask tough questions. But there’s lots of good stuff happening too

On April 11, a fight occurred outside westwood Senior High School in Hudson. One of the two students involved was badly injured. Many fellow students were too preoccupied with filming the fight to realize what had happened.

I’m a Westwood student and I witnessed the fight and how it began, and I disagree with some of the assertions in The Gazette’s report on the incident (“Student’s severe beating recorded for Youtube,” April 17).

Bystanders watched the fight happen, but not all students were insensitive to the scene unfolding before them. One student stepped in to try to break the boys up. Another classmate made a call for help. But the fight happened so quickly that once authorities arrived the damage was already done.

Westwood students are being unjustly blamed. The news media’s portrayal would lead one to believe that Westwood is a place of violence and depravity, which could not be farther from the truth. Violent events are not common at Westwood and by no means happen on a regular basis. I think something we must all bear in mind in inter- preting this situation is that fighting is, and always has been, an unfortunate reality in nearly every high school.

Fighting and violence are omnipresent in our society. Consider our national sport, hockey: fights happen in almost every game, and when they do, the crowd is thrilled and cheers frantically, despite the possibility of a player being seriously injured and the violent nature of what is taking place. We have been conditioned to perceive fights as events in which it is acceptable to be a spectator. Rather than pigeonhole our school and community in the way that has been done in recent days, perhaps we can address the real problem of violence and fighting being part of the culture.

What happened at westwood is deplorable, but that does not make us a bad school. The students of Westwood have done so many positive things. The Gazette quoted a Sûreté du Québec spokesperson saying that while police are there to enforce the law, it’s up to parents and educators to teach morals, as though our school were devoid of moral sense. We are moral. We are a school, a community, that wants to help, to make the world a better place. Every Christmas we head down to Verdun Elementary School to serve lunch and spend time with the children. A few weeks ago, 26 students came back from Ecuador, where they had spent nine days helping a community build a school. We have a social-justice program, and we have our Bridge to Burundi Project, raising the money to build a school halfway around the world. The vast majority of our students adhere to a high moral standard and are deeply empathetic people.

What happened at Westwood was that two students voluntarily showed up to an organized fight. Both were aware of what was going to happen; they knew each other’s intentions. They walked into what turned out to be a big mistake that they will both have to live with. An event like this will hopefully make us all reflect deeply on the situation and what we can all learn from it.

Parents and teachers constantly tell us how important truth is; well, the truth needs to be told. The SQ offi- cer called the fight unfair and said that one of the students was twice the other’s size. That is hyperbole. The students are the same age and the same general size.

What the students of Westwood didn’t do was prevent the fight from happening. We must ask ourselves some key questions: What would have happened that day if someone had advised the school of the impending fight? What would have happened if no one had been watching? What would have happened had people taken a moment to reflect on possible consequences prior to the fight?

We’ll never know the answers, but there is no doubt that Westwood students and staff members have learned from this tragedy.