Witnesses Sought in Attack on 8th-Grader

A Santa Paula middle school is making an aggressive effort to find witnesses to the assault of an eighth-grade girl who was attacked in front of the campus Wednesday afternoon.

The Isbell Middle School honor student’s alleged attacker, a female high school freshman, was arrested by a police officer who happened to be driving by the school at 221 S. 4th St., said Principal Arvid Brommers.

The unidentified older girl allegedly hit, scratched and pulled the hair of the younger student in the apparently unprovoked assault about 2:40 p.m., Brommers said.

“It wasn’t that serious,” the principal said. “[But] we don’t want that kind of thing happening at this school. We’ve done quite a few things in the last few years to make this a safe school.”

That includes designing a new disciplinary system and involving the whole community in the creation of a safe school plan, he said.

Consequently, Isbell doesn’t usually experience such incidents, Brommers said. So the school asked for help from the media within two hours of the incident to publicize its appeal for witnesses.

A flier requesting that parents contact the school if they saw the incident as they picked up their children will be sent home with all pupils, Brommers said.

“We’re going through a lot of anger right now because we have some off-campus element come down and assault our kids,” Brommers said. “We’ve put a lot of pride into the school and we don’t want to see it ruined.”