Melee Erupts at High School

A lunchtime fight at Alain Leroy Locke High School in South Los Angeles exploded into a major disturbance Friday, with teenagers allegedly swinging pipes and bats at one another, school and police officials said. As many as 300 students participated in the melee, which was the second such disturbance at a Los Angeles Unified School District high school in as many weeks.

Six teenagers were arrested on charges ranging from weapons possession to assault on a peace officer. Despite flying chairs and fists, no one was seriously injured and no one was hospitalized. But the Locke brawl shook administrators who said they thought they were making progress in the past year in calming the school, which has a history of fights.

School police and administrators declined to speculate on the cause of the violence, but several students said the fight lined up along ethnic lines, Latinos versus African Americans.

“It was crazy, everybody around was just fighting,” said sophomore Arsenio Ibanez, 15. “Kids were running from all over the school to watch. Administrators were trying to break it up.”

Students said that, over the course of an hour, as soon as one fight was stopped, another began. Officials at the 3,000-student campus, however, say they got the situation under control within a few minutes.

Earlier Friday, the school district announced that it was removing James Noble, principal of Washington Preparatory High School, in the wake of a similar disturbance that engulfed his school on March 28. He will be replaced by Herbert Jones, who previously worked at one of the district’s central offices.

Los Angeles schools Supt. Roy Romer was traveling to his Colorado home, but his spokeswoman Stephanie Brady said he “is extremely concerned about the violence that is occurring.” She said that on Monday, Romer will investigate the causes and ways to curb such incidents.

Locke High School is in the lower tiers of California’s school test rankings and is one of 10 campuses in Los Angeles that have triggered visits from state auditors because of low scores.A little more than a year ago, local subdistrict Supt. Sylvia Rousseau was so alarmed by the bedlam at Locke, with students running though the hallways and frequent fights, that she reassigned the principal, instituted sweeps to combat tardiness and established a school police post there. She named Gail Garrett, a longtime Locke teacher, as principal.

“This is not characteristic of the direction the school was going in the last few months,” Rousseau said. “The climate had been changing, and lunchtime had really become really a great time around here.

“Unfortunately, these are things that can happen while you’re on that journey of pulling together a school,” she added.

Witnesses said that two of the youths involved in the melee were not Locke students. Garrett blamed those boys for starting the fight.

Meanwhile, district administrators removed Washington Prep’s second principal in two years.

After initially expressing confidence in Noble following the March 28 trouble, local subdistrict Supt. Rene Jackson said Friday that Noble had not improved the “safety and security part.”

Noble arrived at the campus less than a year ago after Jackson had removed then-Principal Margueritte Poindexter LaMotte for failing to improve Washington Prep’s test scores, which are comparable to Locke’s. LaMotte has been elected to the school board and will take office July 1.

Eleven students at the 3,800-student campus were arrested during the Washington Prep disturbance.