Bullied Manchester High School Students Brought Knives To School For Protection, Lawmakers Told

By Damien Fisher, NH Journal

Manchester high school students were expelled when they brought knives to school in a misguided attempt to defend themselves from online bullying, according to former school committee member Joy Senecal.

Senecal testified Tuesday before the Committee to Study Violence in Schools about the weapons students regularly bring into the Manchester School District, a situation state Sen. Victoria Sullivan (R-Manchester) called shocking.

“That really broke my heart for these kids that were so afraid to go to school that they felt like they had to defend themselves,” Sullivan said. “They felt like they were at risk of being in harm’s way going to school. They were bullied online significantly, and they were told that they would be found and that they would be harmed. So they brought them in for their own personal defense, and they still had to be expelled.”

The committee is focused on gathering information about in-school violence directed at teachers and administrators. But Senecal, who stepped down from the city school board this year, gave legislators a glimpse of the online dangers students faced.

“Snapchat [was] being used to target these kids because then it disappears,” Sullivan said. “They were being used to say, ‘All right, this person’s going down this hallway. Get them over here.’ So they were actually able to sort of use those as walkie-talkies to target these kids and find out where they were.”

Before Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed the school cellphone ban ahead of the 2025-26 school bullies were using mobile apps like Snapchat to target students for violence in real time, Sullivan said after the committee hearing.

Sullivan said the district’s process for dealing with those three students and others facing expulsion is lacking. The process is too slow and uneven, leaving students and their families without a proper option.

Sullivan recounted how Senecal testified she was aware of many other incidents of weapons being brought into schools and that several armed students in the last few years were never expelled.

For expelled students, the process strings them and their families along for months. In one instance, an armed student was immediately suspended in March and then held in limbo for months as their discipline case slowly proceeded to a formal expulsion hearing in August.

“They have really no way to have an education unless the parents fund it,” Sullivan said.

That means, for whatever reason, a child was being denied their legal right to an education for months on end by school administrators. That potentially creates a legal and financial liability for the district and, ultimately, taxpayers.

Sullivan also said that Senecal told the committee data on in-school violence collected at Manchester’s Central High School and Memorial High School does not show a complete picture of what is happening. If an incident begins as an act of student-on-student violence and then becomes student-on-teacher violence when an adult tries to intervene, that’s not exactly captured in the school data.

“There doesn’t seem to be a lot of data separating the violence student against student and student against teacher. So I think we need to look at that and see what level that is at and we also have to look at how and why it is rising to these levels in the classroom,” Sullivan said.

Escalating tension that erupts into violence can be a sure sign of understaffed schools, stressed teachers, and a lack of clear and fair rules for students to follow, Sullivan said.

“There needs to be administrators that really back the teachers. We need to really have a set of rules and policies that are absolutely adhered to,” Sullivan said. “And I think we need to look at that too, because kids do need to have a set of discipline that they can live up to, and they also need to know that it’s going to be consistent across the board.”

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.