UPDATE: Several hours after I posted this article, Dr. Cheryl Camacho resigned.
I received a letter from the spouse of a teacher at Navarre Middle School in South Bend, IN.
There was a massive fight that broke out at Navarre Middle School on Thursday, April 14.
Concerned citizens took to social media to express their frustrations over another incident at the school.
The letter from a concerned spouse of a Navarre teacher confirms the events people were posting about online.
There was a Malay of fights after school. It was inside and outside. One child told a teacher to move or I’ll shoot you.
My wife tried getting kids back inside.
She was struck once. Kids screaming gun!
The letter also spoke about security at Navarre:
My wife is traumatized. I’m sure there are a lot of kids that are too.
There is no security to speak of.
Police were way late.
This is not the first gun and I believe it’s just a matter of time before there are deaths.
Posts on Facebook indicated when police did arrive, there were numerous officers on the scene.
I reached out to the South Bend Police Department about the fight at Navarre. Here’s their statement:
I can confirm our officers responded to reports of a fight at Navarre Middle School yesterday just after 4 pm. However, while a sizable crowd had formed, our officers only observed two juveniles actively fighting while we were on the scene.
No gun was recovered.
As with most cases happening on school property, any additional information will need to come from South Bend Schools.
I requested comment from Navarre directly but the school is closed today for Good Friday. I’ll update the story when/if I get a response.
As of right now, Navarre has not posted about the incident publicly.
This isn’t the first time I’ve discussed Navarre Middle School.
In June of 2021, Real News Michiana revealed that Jasmine Brown, an 8th grade Social Studies teacher at Navarre was teaching CRT and advocating for Black Lives Matter in her classroom. Jasmine Brown was also Navarre’s Teacher of the Year for 2020-2021. Some of her lessons included how the prison system is designed to over incarcerate minorities and is a modern form of slavery.
As Real News Michiana’s investigations into Navarre continued, we learned that a local police hating BLM activist was promoted to Dean of School Culture at Navarre. Regina Williams-Preston called for police to be removed from schools at a press conference in May 2021.
“This is a public call to school board members, district administrators to do your job, uphold the law and remove police from schools now.”
She has also been tied to Eli Cantu, a local gang member.
Valeria Chamorro taught social studies at Navarre and was promoted to an Assistant Principal position. She repeatedly posted “All Cops Are Bastards” online.
Navarre Middle School is a part of the South Bend Empowerment Zone. Schools in the SBEZ are failing schools in the South Bend Community School Corporation. The SBEZ was created as a way to prevent a state takeover of the schools and to help prevent failing schools from further dragging down SBSC’s proficiency ratings.
Another SBEZ school had a viral moment when a South Bend Police officer was thrown out of Coquillard Elementary School during a standard community walkthrough by the CEO of the South Bend Empowerment Zone.
Dr. Cheryl Camacho expressed her discomfort with the officer’s presence in the school even though he’d been stopping by the school for years, as is commonplace for officers. After the officer asked if she was uncomfortable with him coming by the school, she said:
“Okay, yeah. And it’s not that, I wouldn’t say blanket uncomfortable. We’re just breaking from a lot of past practices to the prior years.”
Dr. Camacho is also in charge of Navarre Middle School.
From the top-down, SBEZ schools like Navarre Middle School are not focused on student education and safety. Rather than focusing on classical education, they are propagandizing students with CRT, 1619 Project lies, and BLM radicalism. Meanwhile, Navarre continues to fail students.
Navarre students are also well below the state average for student growth towards proficiency. In other words, the school is failing to bring students up to speed so they can become proficient.
Beyond the violence discussed at the top of this article, disciplinary issues are also a major problem at Navarre.
At $11,258 per pupil, Navarre Middle School is better funded than the Indiana state average ($10,262).
Their student-to-teacher ratio is equal to, or better than, the state average of 17:1. I’ve found some that calculate their ratio as being closer to 14:1. They are rated as the second-best in South Bend for student/teacher ratio.
Schools with similar demographics in Indiana outperform Navarre by wide margins according to the Indiana Department of Education.
This is a school filled with social justice activists in an Empowerment Zone run by social just activists and they are absolutely failing minority students.
Perhaps Navarre faculty needs to start focusing on education and discipline and less on activism.
There is no better example than Navarre Middle School to support parental school choice.
FAIRus.org is hosting its annual ‘Hold Their Feet To The Fire’ conference and I’m broadcasting live from radio row.
Neil Munro is an immigration reporter at Breitbart and an immigrant from Ireland himself. He is very concerned about the economic impact of illegal immigration and thinks immigration advocates don’t focus enough on those issues.
This is one of the most laughable ‘outrages’ I’ve seen in a while. It’s not a new story. It comes up a few times a year but the answer to the problem is always the same.
First, let me, as a member of the media, highlight why some stories get covered and others don’t. Newsflash, it almost never has anything to do with skin color.
People who just vanish and there’s no additional information or evidence available, tend to not get covered all that much. It’s horrible for the families of the victims but it’s a reality in the news business. There needs to be a ‘hook’ to use to suck the audience into the story.
Those ‘hooks’ could be an unusual set of events, surveillance video showing something that might be relevant to the case, a photograph, text, or cryptic phone call. Sometimes there might even be witnesses. It could also be a small piece of evidence in the case. The media, often at the request of the authorities, puts this info out there to the public so the public can view the evidence and maybe help with the case. If there’s no evidence, the coverage rarely moves beyond the initial few stories for headline news. People like to feel like they can help a case and then become invested in it emotionally.
Crimes that happen in areas that aren’t crime-ridden do tend to get covered more because they are atypical. Is this fair to the victim’s family in those other cases, no. It is a reality though. Most local news outlets that I’ve seen in my career do a great job of highlighting tragic cases involving children even in high crime areas. They don’t often make national news because they aren’t of national interest.
Gabbi Petito’s case had all of the ‘hooks’ that make a compelling news story and then some. She was likely the victim of domestic battery, she was an aspiring social media influencer with fans who followed her travels, her public social media posts provided more evidence in the case, and she was traveling the country when the crime happened which means there’s more need for authorities to get the story on national media to gather evidence. Most stories don’t have most of these components. The fact that Gabby was young, white, and attractive are all secondary factors in the news coverage but people like Joy Reid want you to think those are the primary reasons her story was so widely covered. I’ve covered countless cases like this and the looks or race of the victim are rarely the central dynamics in coverage. The facts and evidence of the case are almost always the driving force. I’ve covered stories with all sorts of races and conventional standards of beauty throughout my career. The only demographic that I’ve ever seen get cast aside and not really given meaningful attention are boys and men who disappear. There are exceptions to that rule but, generally speaking, we cover the missing girl or woman much more readily than for boys or men.
This has never stopped the news media from screaming foul every time a case gets the attention that Gabby’s did when the victim is a white woman.
The media's focus on the Gabby Petito case has been frustrating for some people — who point out that the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women doesn't get nearly the same media attention.https://t.co/CAEI82oXrL
“In the same area that Gabby Petito disappeared, 710 indigenous people— mostly girls—disappeared between the years of 2011 and 2020 but their stories didn’t lead news cycles …” https://t.co/HJ01B6CsRK
Eugene Scott is with the Washington Post. Eugene Scott didn’t know about those other missing people until Gabby went missing. He never bothered to look before so save us the sanctimony.
These hysterics are wonderfully ironic.
The news media is OVERWHELMINGLY liberal. Every survey of the media shows a vast majority are liberal. It’s been that way for decades. Some estimates have the media being around 85% Democrat/liberal. Analysis of the media’s political donations are well over 90% to Democrats. In some election cycles, the media donates to Democrats by as much as 96-97% over Republicans.
The media’s political ideology is only relevant because that same news media tells you constantly that the left is anti-racist and the right is racist.
So, the media says it’s racism that leads to missing white women getting more coverage than minority women but it’s the media who chooses what stories get covered and that media overwhelmingly identifies as being politically left?
If the news media thinks racism is what’s driving missing white women to get more coverage than non-white missing persons then the media should probably stop being so racist in their choice of what they cover, don’t you think?
It’s like the athlete gender pay gap nonsense. If women really cared about women athletes being paid as much as men, women would start watching women’s sports and support those athletes, but they don’t.
All the media has to do to change what stories get the most attention is to … change what stories get the most attention. They are the only ones to blame for this. No one else controls what stories get covered. Maybe stop constantly trying to demonize middle America and Trump for 5 minutes and focus on all of those non-white missing person cases you didn’t know about before lamenting the coverage of Gabby Petito. May she rest in peace and her family get justice.
