PEKIN, Ill. — School days are being disrupted in a Tazewell County high school, as dozens of fights have broken out, with videos posted to social media.
Students tell news partner 25 News, the fights at Pekin High School are a regular occurrence.
At least two Instagram pages, the largest “pekin.fights” posted dozens of videos showing fights, many on school grounds over the course of this school year, several happening in the last week.
“The school is filled with fights every day,” freshman Nevaeh Carver-Ayers said. “It never stops.”
The page “pekin.fights” was growing and gained more than 70 followers over the weekend, topping out at more than 300 before it disappeared Monday.
“All of our fights at our school,” Carver-Ayers said. “A place that all of the students can go to to see it.”
Carver-Ayers says she was also involved in a fight herself earlier this schoolyear. A costly one, she says she was fined more than $100 and suspended.
“The digital age has made it very hard to respond to school discipline,” Illinois Principals Association General Counsel Brian Schwartz said. “It’s becoming harder and harder to work directly with social media companies to get videos taken down. I think that schools have been forced to work with students, to work with parents to try to get the student to voluntarily remove the content.”
Even though some pages get removed, Carver-Ayers says there’s more already.
“There’s all kinds of Pekin pages. There’s ‘Pekin Fights’, ‘Pekin Burn Book’, ‘Pekin Parking,’” Carver-Ayers said.
As of this writing, a second page called “pekin_fights” is still live on Instagram, with more than 200 followers.
25 News reached out to administration at Pekin Community High School but have not received a response.
