Video of girl beating another girl uploaded to YouTube

RAYMONDVILLE - Administrators of the Raymondville school system said they will review the district's cell phone policy after a report of an assault on a middle school student that was recorded with a cell phone and then displayed on YouTube.

It was at least the second time this year students from the school district uploaded violent videos to YouTube, said school board president John Solis. Early this year, a Raymondville High School student used a video to solicit someone to beat another student.

The father of a 13-year-old girl whose recent video-recorded beating was uploaded to the video-sharing Web site said he may press assault charges against the other students he blames for injuring his daughter.

Regino Garcia said Friday he is dissatisfied with the response of school administrators who he believes did not adequately punish those involved in the beating.

Garcia said one Myra Green Middle School student beat his daughter Sara on March 11 while another girl used a cell phone to record the incident, which left Sara with a slight concussion.

A third girl urged the girl striking Sara to "hit her face" during the attack, he said.

Garcia said his daughter didn't know the girls who staged the assault.

"My daughter was just walking down the hall and they tried to get her attention by pushing her," he said. "She basically ignored them and kept on walking.

"Then they pushed her again, and when she turned, they blindsided her," Garcia said. "My daughter did not fight back. She was just covering her face. They just banged on her face."

Garcia said he has a copy of the video that was uploaded to YouTube.

It was unclear Friday whether the recording had been removed from the Web site.

"I call it a perverse sense of entertainment," said Garcia, a principal at Edinburg Alternative Academy, a school for students with discipline problems. "Her face was literally pummeled."

School police charged one girl with Class C misdemeanor fighting, Garcia said. School officials declined to comment on any disciplinary action.

Willacy County Justice of the Peace Juan Silva said the case is in his court.

Garcia said he took his daughter to a Raymondville doctor who determined that she suffered a slight concussion. She was not hospitalized, however.

Superintendent Johnny Pineda said he could not discuss details of the case because it involved students.

"It has been addressed," Pineda said Friday. He would not disclose the girls' names or say how they were disciplined, citing the school district's confidentiality policy.

Solis, the school board president, said officials will have a workshop to discuss policy on student cell phone use.

"We're going to see if we need a stricter cell phone policy or not allow them anymore," he said. "That's what they're doing -videotaping on cell phones.

"It's a new wave. It's happening in other school districts here in the (Rio Grande) Valley. Our school district is not immune."

The attack on Garcia's daughter was one of the latest incidents of violence at Myra Green Middle School, which the Texas Education Agency placed on a "watch list" for the 2007-08 school year.

"Basically, they've been flagged," said DeEtta Culbertson, the agency's spokeswoman in Austin. "They're on notice that they're being watched because they've had too many (mandatory expulsions) for their student population."

The school had a "high incidence of violence of some sort or another" between 2005 and 2007, she said. This year, the school was one of eight in Texas on the watch list.

At YouTube, spokeswoman Victoria Katsarou said company policy prohibited her from commenting on any particular video, but she added: "Real violence is not allowed on YouTube.

"If a video shows someone getting hurt, attacked or humiliated, it will be removed," she said in an e-mailed statement. "Our (audience) polices the site for inappropriate material and users flag content that they feel is inappropriate. Once flagged, content is reviewed by our staff and usually removed from the system within minutes if it violates our ... guidelines."