Student Stabbed in Neck During Fight on Thousand Oaks Campus : Crime: Neither high school teen-ager is seriously hurt, officials say. A 17-year-old is arrested and booked into Juvenile Hall.

An 18-year-old football player was stabbed in the neck with a small knife Thursday during a confrontation with another student at Thousand Oaks High School, authorities said.

Several friends and teammates of the stabbing victim, Rick Coletta, beat and kicked the alleged stabber, a 17-year-old student who was later arrested and booked into Juvenile Hall for assault to commit great bodily injury, police said.

Neither student was seriously hurt, officials said. Coletta was treated at Los Robles Medical Center and released. The 17-year-old was treated on campus by the school nurse, officials said.

Ventura County sheriff’s deputies said they recovered a knife thought to be used in the fight from behind a file cabinet in the school office where the suspect was detained.

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Some students and parents expressed concern that the incident was the latest conflict between white athletes and Latino students. Such conflicts, they say, have been on the rise in the Conejo Valley Unified School District.

Coletta, who is white and a guard on the varsity football team, and the 17-year-old, who is Latino, had been engaged in an ongoing conflict, Assistant Supt. Richard Simpson said.

“We do know these kids have been seen verbally dogging each other for a week,” Simpson said.

School district officials said they have been concerned about race relations on Thousand Oaks campuses. But whether any such tensions prompted Thursday’s stabbing was still under investigation by police and school officials.

Last spring, a fight between a Westlake High School football player and an Asian student escalated into an after-school brawl that left three students hospitalized with gunshot wounds. John Yi, 17, was sentenced last week to a year in jail for his part in the shooting.

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“There are those kinds of tensions and relationships,” Simpson said. “It’s frightening and a little discouraging to hear the bigotry that exists.”

Simpson said all the students involved in the fight will be disciplined. Police and school officials said the incident was not gang-related.

“It’s a matter of one guy staring at another one the wrong way,” Ventura County Sheriff’s Detective Ernie Montagna said.

The confrontation, which occurred about 9:30 a.m. during a break between classes, started when the two students exchanged dirty looks in the hallway, Montagna said.

“Then a little pushing match started and suddenly somebody got stabbed,” he said. “There was not much to it.”

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Sophomore Justin Borchert saw the fight from his Spanish class. “Some kid came up and they were arguing with each other--they fell in the bushes and when the guy got up he was grabbing at his neck. He’d been stabbed.”

When a group of four or five of Coletta’s friends saw that he had been stabbed, they beat and kicked the alleged stabber, Borchert said. “All the football players started kicking him in the head,” he said.

High school officials said the stabbing was an isolated incident. “This is pretty much an aberration,” Principal Keith Wilson said. “(But) it is obviously something we take incredibly seriously.”

Wilson said Coletta’s stab wound “wasn’t deep and wasn’t long.” The student later returned to campus with his parents to talk with school officials.

Some students remained shaken by the brawl, and police presence at the usually quiet campus was high throughout the day.

“(The fight) was horrible,” freshman Michelle Berkely said. “They were kicking and punching him really hard. It reminded me of the Rodney King thing. It was really scary because I was just a few feet away.”

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Three police cars and a Ventura County sheriff’s van responded to the initial call. By 2:10 p.m., when the final bell rang, two police cars were staked out at campus entrances while a third cruised the area.

A plainclothes detective was also on hand as school let out, while teachers and administrators kept watch over the departing students.

Officials said the youth arrested Thursday does not have a criminal history.

Students described the youth as quiet and not a troublemaker. “I’ve never heard of him getting into a fight or anything,” said Blanca Osorio, 18. She described the youth as quiet.

Some students and parents characterized the stabbing as minor but expressed concern that it is an example of growing tension among students.

“They are trying to keep it quiet,” said one parent who asked not to be named. “In and of itself, this may not be a big incident. But this is the fourth or fifth time there has been a confrontation between Latino and white students. . . . There have been a lot of parents meeting and getting together to talk about it, they’re frightened.”

“It’s here,” said sophomore Paul Biasetti, 16, referring to racial tension on campus. “But I think you’re going to find this stuff at every school.”

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Math teacher Manuel Valdez agreed.

“You always have groups of kids who don’t like each other,” Valdez said.

Juniors Jane Smyth) and Kristle Johnson said they know both combatants. And while unsure about what started the fight, they said both teen-agers circulated in separate cliques that have come into conflict in the past.

“I think they’re both to blame,” said Johnson, 17.

Rene Patino, a 17-year-old exchange student from Colombia, said racial slurs have been hurled his way while he attended Thousand Oaks High School.

“Some football player came up to me and called me a ‘beaner’ and told me to go back to my country,” he said. “I told him off . . . I got suspended.”

Patino said he was recently expelled after school officials found a knife in his locker. He claimed the weapon was planted.

“They think (Latinos) are the bad boys,” Patino said of school officials.

Meanwhile, Thousand Oaks Mayor Jaime Zukowski said she has received telephone calls and heard comments lately from parents and students concerned about campus violence.

“There is a fearfulness on the part of some of our students and I know it is something we are all concerned about,” she said. Zukowski said, however, that she believes the violence transcends race.

“Unfortunately, there is a bullying tendency that has increased on campus,” she said. “There is an increasing lack of tolerance for one another.”