On Wednesday, January 31, at approximately 12:11 PM, an altercation between several Chico High and Inspire students escalated into a stabbing incident. Reported Inspire student allegedly stabbed a Chico High student, resulting in a reported seventeen stitches on her neck. 

The suspect identified themself as the perpetrator to police, and remained with the victim, providing first aid until further medical help arrived. There were several females present, with one recording the incident, as seen on security footage. 

Many students who spoke about this incident did not seem surprised this occurred, with Reese Green (11) stating “I wasn’t that shocked, I’ve seen a lot in public schools…my friend was surprised there were knives, but I wasn’t…These things happen all the time downtown.

Another student, who wished to remain anonymous, says that “Administration is handling this situation very poorly.”

Principal Ms. Brown commented on plans for when things like these happen. 

“So we have just like any other school, a safety plan that we have in place that can be accessed on the website that includes all sorts of crisis situations and how we manage them as a school. I’ll be real honest and say that Mr. Hardy and I feel like we have a lot of work to do as a school to have those kinds of templates in our mind of how we respond in a whole bunch of different crises.”

Several others echoed the sentiment that ‘these things just happen downtown’. Many seemed apathetic to the violence happening around our campus. In response to that, Principal Ms. Brown had this to say:

“I want to do some looking into and some digging into [downtown], I think downtown is not super safe, for a lot of different reasons. There are organizations, Schools, Chico PD, the Downtown Business Association, I think there are ways that we can kind of get people together and talk about, we have these hordes of students walking downtown at lunch, they’re walking through children’s Park, which is an extremely sketchy place. We don’t have the staffing to be able to put, you know, officers or, you know, supervisors down there. And so what can we do?”

Downtown business owner, Krista Lapp, suggested this:

“I think it’s something to consider perhaps not having off-campus lunch for high school students because there are lots of fights and things that happen during that time, and I also think the school perhaps should have taken the bullying more seriously as I heard this girl was bullied for over a month.”

Do you believe the administration is handling this issue well? Are you concerned about violence on our campus? What do you think should happen following this incident? Drop a comment or reach out to us via email: [email protected] or Instagram @inspirepurplepages. We want to hear from you.

Previously, this article stated that the event occurred March 31st. This was a mistake. The article as been amended 2/13