HHS Administration Takes Action after Difficult First Week

by Dakota Antelman

A cluster of fights and two arson attempts, all within 36 hours of one another, prompted HHS to reevaluate its methods of crowd control at a recent football game and upgrade its outdated security system.

Custodians first discovered toilet paper in two boys bathrooms had been burnt in an apparent arson attempt on Thursday, September 8. Less than a day later, two students at lunch added to the week’s unrest when their verbal argument escalated into a physical fight. Hours after the first fight, a brawl broke out outside the Morgan Bowl during a football game, drawing police to HHS.

In response to those incidents, HHS had an extra administrator help with crowd control at the most recent football game against Clinton and has begun the process of replacing and expanding a series of old security cameras that are impeding investigations into on-campus incidents.

“We don’t see a lot of fights in school. It does happen sometimes though; we can’t avoid that,” HHS Principal Brian Reagan said, adding. “When it happens, it’s upsetting.”

The first of the two fights this year broke out shortly after 11 am on Friday, September 9, and it had to be broken up by HHS administrators. 

“They had a disagreement at the lunch table,” Reagan explained. “One went a little too far with his comments and made a comment that incited his buddy across the table. Next thing you know, he got up and started striking him.”

Though one student was “more physical” than the other, Reagan said that both were suspended for their roles in the fight.

Reagan and other administrators were able to uncover more information about the cafeteria fight than the fight at the football game later that night.

Having not seen the brawl at Morgan Bowl himself, Reagan had to rely on the reports of the responding police officers, which he said only gave him vague answers to his questions.

In the days since, he has worked with administrators at Assabet in an attempt to piece together what happened and who was involved. This work has, so far, only yielded minimal results, with the Assabet principal calling on Monday to tell Reagan that a Hudson High School student’s name was “buzzing around” in association with the fight.

“We’re following up on that,” Reagan said in regards to the call. “Right now, we’ll take any lead we get.”

Before either of the fights, custodians working at the school on Thursday night found burnt toilet paper rolls in two boys bathrooms.

Reagan said that someone apparently tried to set the toilet paper on fire between 5:30 pm and 6:00 pm that night, but was prevented from creating a large fire because of the metal casing that the toilet paper is dispensed from.

He added that the investigation has been complicated by outdated security systems currently in place at the high school.

The 14 cameras installed through the building are mostly eight years old and film in low resolution.

After the incident, Reagan and members of the Hudson technology department met to discuss upgrading the systems. They currently plan to replace the existing cameras and add more cameras both inside and outside HHS by mid October.

The new cameras will cover more of the school and record in higher quality, allowing administrators to better identify suspicious students.

Beyond adding the cameras after the arson attempts, the brawl at Morgan Bowl has prompted administrators to examine what went wrong and what could have been improved to avoid it.

Primarily, Reagan wishes he brought in more adults to help control the crowd, especially on a day where Athletic Director Jessica Winders was unable to attend the game.

“I’ve covered a lot of games with her in the past, so it didn’t even cross my mind to think, “Let’s get some more people in here.’”

In addition to staffing, the game against Assabet highlighted the need to keep teams and fans separate following games. Ordinarily, the opposing team’s bus parks behind the school. Assabet’s bus, however, parked in the main Riverside parking lot, meaning that fans from both schools were following their teams into the Morgan Bowl at the start of the game and out of it at the end of the game, creating a bottleneck situation.

As the school year continues, Reagan hopes that the new cameras and the measures put in place at the games will prevent fights from escalating to the extent that they have so far. Likewise, he hopes that the punishments handed out to the students involved in these incidents will discourage others from fighting.

“Students see someone get suspended for two weeks or longer, and if they are thinking about having a fight, it might quiet things down,” Reagan said, later adding. “Hopefully this is a blip, and we don’t see more this year. If we detect some type of a pattern, we’ll have to think of some sort of other reaction.”