Report Says Principal Put Students in Cage to Fight

By GRETEL C. KOVACH

DALLAS — A high school principal and his security staff shut feuding students in a steel cage to settle disputes with bare-knuckle fistfights, according to an internal report by the Dallas Independent School District.

The principal of South Oak Cliff High School, Donald Moten, was accused by several school employees of sanctioning the “cage fights” between students in a steel equipment enclosure in a boy’s locker room, where “troubled” youth fought while a security guard watched, according to the confidential March 2008 report first obtained by The Dallas Morning News.

Such fights occurred several times over the course of two years, the report said.

Mr. Moten, who resigned from the district in 2008 while under investigation in connection with a grade-changing scandal, denies the cage-fight accusations.

“That’s barbaric,” he told The Dallas Morning News. “You can’t do that at a high school. You can’t do that anywhere. It never happened.”

But investigators with the district’s Office of Professional Responsibility gathered testimony from two employees at South Oak Cliff High who said they had witnessed students fighting in the cage from 2003 to 2005, among others who heard about the fights.

One employee overheard Mr. Moten tell a security guard to take two students who had been at each other for days and “put ’em in the cage and let them duke it out,” the report states, and the practice was so embedded in the school’s culture that one student remarked to a teacher that he was “gonna be in the cage.”

The district is on spring break, and officials did not return calls for comment.

Mr. Moten, 56, is a former Dallas police officer who once lied about being kidnapped and robbed at gunpoint to get out of work, for which he was placed on administrative leave.

The district uncovered the cage-fight accusations while investigating a scandal that forced South Oak Cliff to relinquish its 2005 and 2006 state boys basketball championship titles.

The district found that Mr. Moten had pressured teachers to change the failing grades of athletes so they were eligible to play.

Corporal punishment is permitted in some states, but school-sanctioned fistfights as a means of conflict resolution is virtually unheard of, said Dr. Joan F. Goodman, an expert in school discipline at the University of Pennsylvania School of Education.

“Schools need to think much more carefully about how they can find outlets, socially appropriate outlets, for aggression,” Dr. Goodman said. “But to just go into a room and slug it out until someone wins, that’s obviously condoning violence, and the school has no business condoning violence. If kids think this kind of behavior is encouraged, it could spread.”

Frank Hammond, a former counselor at South Oak Cliff who was fired and filed a whistle-blower lawsuit, said that the cage fights were common knowledge, but that he did not report them to the district at the time because he knew nothing would be done.

The district referred the matter to its police force, the report states, but no charges have been filed.

A school-based fight club runs counter to the last decade or more of research into school discipline, said Dr. Russ Skiba, who directed the Safe and Responsive Schools Project at Indiana University.

“We’ve found over time that those types of strategies just don’t work,” Dr. Skiba said. “They are more likely to encourage aggression than to solve it.”