MARRERO, La. —
Billy North spent a quarter-century as the head football coach and athletic director at John Ehret High School.
So it was no surprise to him to learn that more than a dozen fights have happened at the Marrero school since the start of the academic year.
These days, North sits on the Jefferson Parish School Board. He said that while fights are not uncommon, they are not OK.
And he said much of the violence on campus did not start there.
“It is my personal experience that the uptick in fighting at our schools is directly correlated to the uptick in violence in the community,” he said Thursday, a day after WWL-TV reported on the fights.
There has been an uptick in violence in Marrero during the past few weeks with six people killed in nine shootings
RELATED: 'Your children are not safe at John Ehret': Parents, teachers say fights are out of control
Former New Orleans police superintendent and Loyola criminology professor Ronal Serpas agrees that community conflicts can surface in the schools.
“A lot of those younger people who are involved in violent acts, maybe neighborhood beefs or all kinds of disagreements, many of them do go to school,” he said. “Many of them don’t go to schools, but they have the same friendships after school.”
Serpas said that the school district can only stop the fights by removing the students responsible.
“Children who have come to school with the desire to create havoc and danger for other students who are all doing the right things are always the smallest number of kids,” Serpas said. “Let's focus on that small number of kids to protect the bigger number of kids.”
North said the School Board is focused on that.
“We're not sitting back and saying, ‘Oh, boy. I wonder what's going to happen now. Let's react to it.’ That is not happening right now. We are being proactive, but it's not as easy as just stopping fights,” he said. “The kids that are fighting and the ones that are acting out are the ones that need the most support. But, we can't support them all the time in a traditional school.”