Hearing of hazing situations in other CUSD schools leaves people asking: what does my school do to prevent this situation from happening here? If it happened at one school, what’s stopping it from happening at our school? Some students are unaware of the precautions that administration takes to prevent these type of situations from happening.

When asked about what administration does to prevent hazing on campus, Principal Dan Serrano spoke on the importance of supervision and mandatory reporting.

“Every year teachers have to go through a training that tells teachers, ‘If you have any suspicion of harassment, bullying, hazing, abuse, you have to report it by law,’ because if you don’t, you can get in trouble.”

Mandatory reporting laws require that teachers report any suspicion of child abuse, exploitation, neglect, abandonment, etc. in order to protect the child. If a teacher was to withhold that sort of information, they could be at risk of losing their teaching license and being prosecuted.

News of the arrests in connection to the Hamilton hazing scandal has left the CUSD community in shock. With HHS having one of the more prestigious football programs in the nation, learning about a hazing scandal coming out of their program has blindsided the district. With the recent events at Hamilton, Serrano held a meeting with the coaches to remind them of their responsibilities in the locker rooms.
“If you see something, if you hear something, you have to report it.” Serrano said, “I think a lot of times when things happen there has been, sometimes there’s a cry for help that we’re not realizing.”

Coaches were required to sign in at the meeting and were told that the locker rooms were their responsibility and their duty was to ensure the safety of their students.

“We talk about leadership and treating people the way you want to be treated and how you want your school to be looked at,” Head Varsity Coach Preston Jones said. “We really rely on our upperclassmen to set an example for our lower level football kids. We talk about society in general and that just because you’re bigger, stronger, or faster doesn’t make you better person. We’re all equal.”

Coaches set an example from the beginning of their season, that no one is better than another person, that everyone is equal.

Senior Antonio Gomez played on the varsity football team this year and believed that the coaches were very strict about hazing in their program.

“They told us no hazing at the beginning of the season,” Gomez said. “They were nice about it too. They told us to report any problems to them and they wouldn’t judge and get rid of the problem so, they couldn’t hurt anyone anymore.”
Letting their students know at the beginning of the season how harsh they would be on hazing is one way to prevent that kind of harassment from happening in the locker room, but also letting their players know that they have a support system if anything was to happen is even more important.