Setting aside the "game" of slugging each other in the chest, there is a more disturbing link between two incidents that resulted in out-of-court settlements for the Beaufort County School District.
Both involved students who had repeated discipline problems.
They raise the question of whether school officials do enough to remove children who cause problems for teachers and other students. Or do rules and regulations prevent them from taking the steps necessary to keep order in the classroom and keep children safe?
The Beaufort County School District recently settled for $440,000 a lawsuit filed by the mother of a former Robert Smalls Middle School student who was critically injured after another student punched him and knocked him down in 2006.
In 2007, the district paid $200,000 to the family of Francisco Belman, who died in 2002 from injuries he suffered at H.E. McCracken Middle School.
The Matthew Walls lawsuit claimed that the student who punched him had a long history of behavior violations and prior assaults.
The records compiled by the family's attorney contain more than 90 Sheriff's Office reports documenting incidents of assault and battery at Robert Smalls Middle School between January 2001 and July 2006. Some of the reports document fights between students, and others detail assaults on school employees.
The school district denied the specific allegations in the Walls lawsuit, but the Sheriff's Office reports clearly signaled a problem at the school.
In the Belman case, one of the two boys who punched him hard enough to cause cardiac arrest had a string of disciplinary problems the year before while a student at Hilton Head Island Middle School. But his disciplinary records didn't go with him when he transferred to H.E. McCracken.
In 2003, as a result of the fallout from Belman's death, the district instituted new rules that required students' disciplinary records to go with them when they moved to another school. The records also were to contain information on the number of times a student had been given an out-of-school suspension or been expelled.
School officials also said then that they had set up a districtwide database that contained a student's disciplinary records, detailing offenses, actions taken and any other details teachers or administrators wanted to include.
That was six years and three superintendents ago. We hope policies and procedures remain in place to help teachers and administrators know what has happened with a student in school years past. We suspect that no matter what policies are in place, there's room for improvement.
We also know there are students, parents, teachers and administrators frustrated with the seemingly impossible task of removing a child with serious discipline problems from the classroom.
This year, the district is trying yet another approach to educating problem middle and high school students apart from other students.
Yes, it is a balancing act. No one wants to give up on a child, especially at a young age. But there comes a time when other children suffer and the jobs of hard-working people are made needlessly difficult.
If there's more to be done, let's find out what it is and do it. If there are laws or regulations that need to change, let's change them.
But let's not shrug our shoulders and say there's nothing more to do. The children who are trying to learn and the teachers who are trying to teach deserve more.
