Spring High focuses on spirit, security 1 year after melee

For the first time in a decade, Spring High School's homecoming parade was taken out of mothballs and revived. Hundreds of supporters lined the streets to see the green-and-white sequined drill team strut, the lion mascot roar, and the band play:

"Stand up for Spring! Let her glory ring! As proudly we raise our voices in her praise!"

In recent years, many students have been mute when their alma mater played, because few knew the words. But this fall was different. Spring's newly appointed principal, Tia Simmons - who'd served as the district's accountability director for a year before tackling this assignment - insisted that student organizations teach everyone the words so the song could be belted out.

It's all part of a concerted effort by the new principal to restore what she calls "student pride, ownership and belongingness" at this district north of Houston more than a year after a bloody gang-related brawl in the cafeteria. The melee ended with the fatal stabbing of one teen and the serious wounding of three others, followed by a memorial service disrupted by screams and gunfire. A jury last month sentenced a fourth teen to 20 years in prison for his role.

While deceivingly simplistic, the principal's school spirit is having a healing effect, many students say. They credit the newly found school pride - combined with stricter security and better connection with once-disenfranchised students - for a quick turnaround at the high school.

"There used to be a lot of fights. It wouldn't be unusual for me to see one fight a day while walking to class. But now you don't see them. It's gotten real quiet," said 18-year-old Bradley Bynum. "It also used to be boring here. There was no real school spirit. Now we have a homecoming parade and pep rallies. I went to my first pep rally this year."

Another student, 16-year-old Sierra Roy, agreed.

"Things got out of hand last year," she said. "But today the student body feels more like a family. When students are involved in things, they don't get into trouble. School pride is rising."

Simmons is determined to give the school's 3,000 students a reason to show their allegiance to the campus, instead of to a street gang.

Gang brawl

But on the morning of the Sept. 4, 2013, brawl, the words "Brown Pride" were being chanted by members of a Hispanic gang of the same name and echoing down a school corridor. This group would clash in a chaotic free-for-all with African-American students, many of whom identified with another clique that had formed in junior high and called itself "Drama."

In the past decade, the school, located in the far outreaches of north Harris County off Interstate 45, has experienced a dramatic change in demographics as more minority families moved to the suburbs. The white population has dropped from 65 percent to 29 percent. The black population at the same time doubled to 30 percent, and the Hispanic population jumped to 36 percent.

Yet, rather than embrace the diversity, some students had been forming "little cliques" that often divided along racial lines, said 16-year-old Alayah Bechet.

That's why the school's theater arts group this year decided to perform the play "The Laramie Project," about the murder of a gay university student that was denounced as a hate crime.

"We wanted to use it to bring people together and help us accept our differences," said Roy, an officer in the theater arts program. "It's about the acceptance of everyone, from the color of their skin to body size and sexual preference."

She believes it is helping change some hearts.

That's a change from last year, students say.

Then, Brown Pride members could be found lined up along a cafeteria wall before classes started. They were easily recognizable. Some wore Dickies work pants and Nike Cortez tennis shoes in the colors of brown, black or white, and some would hang rosaries around their neck, students said.

The clique of African-American students was formed by some friends who hung out together in junior high, Bynum said.

"They picked the name 'Drama,' which had no connection to theater arts," Bynum said. "Then each member gave themselves fake names. They made T-shirts and put those names on the back."

Eventually, students noticed power struggles, a king-of-the-hill mentality that boiled into fights between the cliques.

Spring is one of 14 school districts that reported "school-related gang violence" in 2012-13 to the Texas Education Agency. Other districts reporting gang incidents were Houston, Aldine, Alief, Cypress-Fairbanks, Klein, Fort Bend, Pasadena, Goose Creek, Lamar Consolidated, Channelview, North Forest, Tomball and Sheldon.

"There probably isn't a high school or middle school that doesn't have some kind of gang issue," said Mike Knox, who started Houston's first gang task force in 1988 and has been a gang consultant for nearly two decades. He said the worst thing a school district can do is deny they exist.

Bus stop fistfight

On the day the violent brawl erupted at Spring, prosecutors said, emotions were running high on social media about a fistfight at a bus stop the day before. The so-called leader or "CEO" of Brown Pride had come out on the losing end and been "disrespected," which had infuriated his girlfriend and other Brown Pride members, court witnesses said.

Words were exchanged when the groups confronted each other in the cafeteria the next morning, and suddenly everything escalated.

"At first I heard 'oohing and ahhing.' People in the crowd were hollering that 'There's a fight!' " recalled Bynum. "Then I heard screaming, high-pitched, like I'd never heard in my life. People were running everywhere, trying to get away. It was chaos."

That's when Bynum spotted 17-year-old Joshua Broussard, who was trying to speak, but no sound came out. Broussard then fell against a wall and slid down, exposing a slit in his gut that was gushing blood, Bynum said. It was one of eight stab wounds that authorities said Broussard sustained before he died. Three others survived their knife wounds, including one who was hospitalized with a critical stomach wound and another who lost mobility in an arm that was cut.

'It got real' with knife

"Everybody had been watching the fight until it got real with a knife," Marcus Cooper, a Spring football player, testified.

He described seeing Broussard trading blows with Luis Alfaro, the 18-year-old later convicted of manslaughter for Broussard's stabbing. Alfaro was much smaller and being beaten back when he flicked open a pocket knife with a seven-inch blade, Cooper said.

Prosecutor Kelli Johnson said Broussard's killing was a sad case of "mistaken identity," as he was never a participant in the bus fight

Milan Marinkovich, the attorney who defended Alfaro, insists his client was only banding together with others for protection and never deeply enmeshed in a gang. In a statement to investigators, Alfaro admitted covering his eyes with one arm and waving the knife back and forth in self-defense.

But prosecutors pointed to videos taken from Alfaro's cellphone that showed him and other Brown Pride members "jumping" young wannabes (a beating initiation for newcomers).

Marinkovich, meanwhile, blamed the Spring school administration for the brawl, saying they were "aloof" and had failed to take action when they saw danger signs. "They created a perfect storm," he said.

But Gloria Marshall, who served as Spring's principal from 1986 to 2007 and rode in a silver Corvette as this year's parade grand marshal, disagreed.

"Anything can happen when you get thousands of kids under one roof at any school," she said, noting Spring has been proactive since the incident and installed both a new principal and new superintendent.

She said gangs are disappearing into the background as students are mingling together now and no longer forming cliques: "There's a real feeling of excitement in the air to an extent that I've not seen for a while."

Sometimes the simplest things help students reconnect to their school, said the principal, who has ordered the staff to "call students by their names" in the hallways. She also held an activity fair before school started to encourage student participation in school organizations.

"This let students see there is more to take pride in than just football," Bechet said.

And the principal has worked to forge stronger communications with parents. She did this by not only re-establishing the high school's defunct PTA but also hosting multiple "community outings" everywhere from Starbucks to Shipley's Donuts where parents could vent their concerns.

At the same time, security issues had to be addressed, as many said they no longer felt safe. Metal detectors, clear backpacks and cellphone restrictions became part of their everyday campus life.

Students like 17-year-old Robert Cartas hated losing some freedoms and seeing their school look more like an armed camp. But many, like Cartas, said they also appreciated the protection and felt it would be "impossible for anybody to get a knife onto the campus now."

With all these efforts, some community residents believe they're seeing a new sense of unity at Spring High.

"When I'm at a football game and look into the stands, I don't see little cliques any more," said community pastor E.A. Deckard. "I see Spring High School rooting for their team."