Culture of schoolyard violence | Coffs Coast News | Local News in Coffs Coast

we have chosen to live in a society now where we cannot punish our kids at school ,at home, when we are out in public.Basically if we do wrong at work as adults we are punished with the sack.If we do wrong on the sporting field,we are punished. If our kids wag school or misbehave at school ,hey they are suspended. Good punishment .My opinion is that kids spend most of thier lives at shcool and if they are given a free riegn to carry on like these kids are on u-tube look out in another 10years or so when they leave school and have the belief that they can pretty well get away with anything.

My Daughter Attended Orara High School at the beginning of the year . After the 1st term i pulled her out & sent her to another school , i was sick of her being bullied & told they are gunna bash her , i even had the girls come to my home & yell abuse at me , i involved the police in this matter . My daughter is too scared to go out alone now. Her life has been turned upside down because of this & she lives in fear ..... The Bullying has to Stop , i approached the Headmaster only to be told the matter is being delt with ..Yes Like How May I Ask??????????

How proud their parents must be. Children model their behaviour on those around them, I hope i dont run into any of them then. Then again it' not often that i go into Centrelink..

Schoolyard bullying and cyber bullying is rife across the state However I think the Advocate should have the facts correct about what they put up as a Schoolyard Fight as a culture of schoolyard violence.
The incident at Woolgoolga did not occur at the school, it occured out of school. The students concerned have been dealt with.
Woolgoolga High deals very well with the isolated incidents of violence that do occur, there is NO WAY there is a culture of violence at the school.
I do agree with rupert66 in that we no longer have the rights as parents, and teachers don't either, to discipline effectively. Suspension only gives these kids another opportunity to NOT be at school, to hang out on the streets and not be educated or disciplined in any way. It is not the answer but it would also be inappropriate to allow badly behaved students to be in school disrupting others and possibly causing harm. Perhaps there should be a special place for these students to be sent during their suspension where they can be counselled and given anger management strategies?
I also agree with nibber, it does make one wonder just what example and what behaviour parents model for their children. Another big question possibly without easy answers.

BTW Advocate, your survey is misguided. Most students have been involved in a fight or argument, push and shove. This biased survey should be removed or rewritten to ask questions such as what degree of violence was used, what happened to the participants etc.

Once again, the true route cause of such shocking and barbaric behavior is completely neglected. This article places the emphasis on violent movies, on television, on other such images, whilst the only people whom can be held responsible for raising such little monsters are the parents. Shame, shame, shame. Not only should the children involved be punished, but their parents also.

I am a previous student of Coffs Harbour High School, and I would have to say that when I began there in Year 7, I was extremely shocked, and scared by how many fights I saw in just a matter of months.
By the time I reached Year 10, I was so used to seeing these fights that after a while, unfortunately, they became part of the school. However, half way through year ten, the Principal at the time enforced a lock-down system, where teaches would patrol every area of the grounds with 2-way radios. An idea that should be enforced in most schools in the area, as during year 11 and 12, i recall only seeing one other fight at the school.
Violence can not be stopped, but it can be prevented!
Coffs Harbour High School was, and still is, a great school and I am very proud to have attended there, however, it is the immature students who make it hard for the others to learn. I don't believe we should blame the school, the teachers, or even the Principal for this kind of behavior, I only think we should blame, and punish, the child. If they wish to create violence, than they should accept the concequence of no longer furthering their education. Although it may seem harsh at times, they will always be running the risk of their own, or somebody elses, life if they continue, as we've seen in the past month.
Coffs Harbour High School today, in my honest opinion (and from what I've seen in the media lately), is a representation of creating a possitive atmosphere for our students learning environment, and if more schools in the area were like Coffs High, then maybe we would see an improvement to the issue.
Video broadcasting sites, like YouTube, are always going to be available to students, so, in my strongest opinion, i believe it comes down to the school, the students, the parents and the community to come up with a stratergy to prevent these acts from continuing. Even if it means to expell students, or completely ban mobile phones being used on school grounds.
I am sure, if we can create a place on the interenet to broadcast violent videos in a matter of seconds, we can all work together to come up with a preventitive startergy.

All the best.

This is appalling behavior of course. And putting the videos up for all to see is worse. But what is just as bad is seeing the videos pictured in the paper also broadcast some of the responses to the video for all to see is just what feeds these people to keep doing it. Newspapers are media also. Why not write an article and leave it at that?

A bit ridiculous embedding the video here, that's glamorizing it even more.

Perhaps it would be more suitable for the Advocate to publish a story a little less bias than this one, and that did not give such a bad name to a huge number of innocent students by using sweeping generalisations and over-the-top assumptions and adjectives. I do not feel that, considering the circumstances, it is particularly appropriate to exploit the death at Mullumbimby as well, after the father of the boy spoke up about how actions such as these are not the way to go about changing anything.
This article does nothing but give High School students a bad name, when in fact the majority of us have, and never will be, a part of a school yard fight. Those of us who attend Orara and Woopi now are faced with the possibility of a whole town resenting us because of the uniform we wear, because of the implications of this article.
Perhaps you should ask yourselves instead, what is causing these few students to behave in such a matter, instead of blaming the school system, and singling out particular schools, and technological advances which are impossible to slow down, or stop. Mobile phones and the Internet are a part of our lives and society now.
I agree completely with Noddy, and think the Advocate, and it's readers, should stop and have a look at what is actually happening and why it is happening. Not use a view count on a YouTube video as a statistic to prove their point.

How about a little balance and truth Advocate. You obviously trawled through youtube in a desperate attempt to dig up a story and the best you could do for all the schools and students in Coffs is come up with 4 videos, only two of which are actual fights that are school related. I did the same seaching and one of your videos is a play fight and the other shows older kids, not in any uniform, outside of a school with no school kids to be seen?? To get the two videos you finally found you had to trawl back to 6 months ago and 12 months ago. You then matched the wrong video with different comments to get the desired effect. This is just sensationalism. Sorry to say, there have been and always will be fights at schools. I'd say they are probably dealt with nowdays more thoroughly than they ever were. It is just that people can so easily video one and put it out there that it makes any news at all. To say the problem is rife when all you can dig up is 4 children fighting in a 12 month period from many thousands is just a desperate grabb at headlines in an attempt to capitalise on the grief of the poor family and community up at Mullumbimby. Shame on you! Journalism isn't trawling the net to make up a story, I can do that for myself. Why not get your journalists away from a computer in an office and actually out into the community to do some real reporting on all the good things that happen in our schools and with our kids.