Children were back on campus for just under two weeks when a student at Ryan High School in the Dallas suburb of Denton allegedly stabbed a classmate.
It happened at 9:10 a.m. Friday, reported The Dallas Morning News. Both students were boys under the age of 17. The injured student suffered non-life-threatening wounds, while the alleged stabber has reportedly been charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
For many Texas parents, it was déjà vu.
In early April, just weeks before the school year ended, then-17-year-old Karmelo Anthony, a student at Frisco Centennial High School, allegedly stabbed 17-year-old Austin Metcalf to death in the bleachers at a track meet. The story made national headlines. That same month, a student at Killeen High School also tried bringing a knife to campus; the next day, another from Creekside Elementary in Corpus Christi was caught carrying a kitchen steak knife.
Weeks earlier, in Harris County, a Cypress Springs High School student was hospitalized after being stabbed in a restroom.
And, after years of warnings from parents about bullying and physical violence in Killeen Independent School District, 14-year-old Serenity Baker was fatally stabbed by another student at Roy J. Smith Middle School on March 10.
The school district’s response angered parents who said administrators failed to communicate directly with them — and failed to take action on longstanding safety issues. One parent told The Barbed Wire that, a year earlier, she’d warned the district that a child could die.
“They were going to lose a child if they didn’t fix the bullying issue,” that parent told The Barbed Wire in April. “And yet, almost exactly a year later, look what happens.”
Another said he helped plan a town hall meeting after Baker’s death and invited district administrators — but none of them showed up. Baker’s mother, Glenda Jacobs, said no one from Killeen ISD immediately contacted her and that she’d learned about her own daughter’s stabbing from another parent.
“Nobody reached out to me,” she said, as the Killeen Daily Herald reported. “Everybody’s on social media. No one here at KISD reached out to me and said anything.”
Now, months later, and some 200 miles north of Killeen, Denton parents have united under a similar rallying cry, concerned about not just the uptick in violence — but also the alleged lack of communication from the school district.
Several Denton parents told KDFW FOX 4 News that, after last week’s stabbing, a community-wide email about a student “in need of medical attention” left out crucial information — and many parents only learned there had been a stabbing through social media. At a meeting this week, parents showed up to voice their concerns, but the school board didn’t address the stabbing at all.
In a statement, the Denton school district said the incident happened in a classroom of five students outside of the main building, and the guardians for those students were contacted directly.
“At no time was the broader student body placed at risk,” the statement continued.
Yet, the stabbings reflect a growing prevalence of physical violence in schools after the COVID-19 pandemic. In the 2023-2024 academic year, there were 54,303 recorded incidents of fighting or mutual combat between students statewide, nearly 11% higher than pre-pandemic numbers from 2018 to 2019, according to data from the Texas Education Agency. In a November 2024 board meeting, Killeen ISD reported that at least 174 of its employees had been physically injured by a student since August.
During this year’s legislative session, Texas lawmakers filed several bills on these issues, including banning the use of cellphones in schools, which has largely gone into effect. House Bill 6, which was signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in June, gives Texas schools the discretion to discipline students — regardless of age — who repeatedly engage in behavior that threatens the safety of others in the classroom. Previous state law prohibited the suspension of students in pre-K through second grade, except for serious offenses such as bringing weapons to school.
The laws haven’t done much to quell parental concerns, however.
Gambrielle Montgomery-Seaton, who lives in Killeen, withdrew her child from Roy J. Smith following Baker’s death. Her sixth-grade son, now homeschooled, would repeatedly tell her about the fights he witnessed in the school bathroom, hallway, and the nearby creek, she told The Barbed Wire.
Now, a few weeks into a new academic year, she feels like the district has done little to address parents’ fears from the spring. And as students return to classrooms, Montgomery-Seaton — who has another son still in the district, studying at Chaparral High School — is worried.
“I have not seen or heard of any progress or changes that have been made to address the initial concerns,” Montgomery-Seaton told The Barbed Wire in an email. “NO kid should be afraid to go to school, and no parent should fear sending their children to school.”
Montgomery-Seaton said she read about the Denton stabbing: “It’s happening everywhere, and it’s a growing concern.”
What’s worse, because of the state’s newly-implemented cell phone ban, parents said they were unable to reach their children once the news broke.
“If you want to take my children’s phone, I want full transparency. Period,” one mother told KDFW FOX 4 News.
“Stop shutting parents out, stop covering up important information,” Montgomery-Seaton said. “Let’s come together as a community to really figure out how to address and fix the safety concerns.”
‘Imagine Walking Down the Hallway Where One of Your Fellow Classmates Was Killed’
Killeen ISD, situated in Central Texas about an hour drive north from Austin, serves over 43,000 students. In recent years, Killeen has been ranked as the second fastest-growing city in the U.S. and among the best places to live in Texas, according to the U.S. News & World Report.
Thousands of military employees and veterans from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds call Killeen home, largely due to its proximity to Fort Hood, one of the biggest Army installations in the U.S.
Yet, some of the recent shimmer around Killeen, which still radiates the atmosphere of a small country town, has masked entrenched problems. At the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year, Killeen ISD reported that over 61% of its students were economically disadvantaged.
One mother in Killeen, who requested anonymity in speaking with The Barbed Wire to protect her 17-year-old daughter, said the city is promoted as a family-friendly working town and, as such, many issues get overlooked (The Barbed Wire independently confirmed her identity and affiliation with the district). For her, the district treated the stabbing at Roy J. Smith as a “one-and-done problem” and has a history of parental exclusion.
“I don’t know how many parents have (come) to me and told me, ‘Hey, I want to be involved in the school, but the staff keeps me out of the school,’” she said.
The issues of the greater Killeen community spill into the district and vice versa, said Aya Fubara Eneli, a Killeen resident of more than 15 years whose five children all went through the local public schools.
A decade ago, Eneli was a football mom for the varsity team at Harker Heights High School. She noticed that parents weren’t responding to her emails, so she spoke with their children to reach them.
“I found out that their parents sometimes don’t have internet access, so they’re not going to get that email. The phones are turned off. The water is turned off,” Eneli said. “There are other life issues that are happening, so they’re not focused on, ‘What is the football mom sending us about how we need to plan for senior night?’”
Eneli said students’ circumstances at home impact how they show up and behave in school, describing it as a “vicious cycle” that can lead to outcomes such as truancy and failing grades.
Darante Simmons, the father of the student accused of fatally stabbing Serenity Baker, posted a message to the community on social media explaining that his daughter “has lived a life filled with hardship.” As the Killeen Daily Herald reported, Simmons said her mother had substance abuse issues, which meant that she spent time in foster care. Simmons also said she never had new clothes or regular meals — things that “made her a target for bullying.”
Simmons told the newspaper he’d filed numerous reports with Killeen ISD and with the Killeen Police Department about the ongoing bullying and that nothing was done.
The district’s board of trustees called for an emergency meeting the day after the stabbing, but it left parents with more questions than answers. The board heard public comments — several parents mentioned the lack of security and communication between the school and students’ families when the incident happened — before going into closed session for an hour.
Days later, around 170 parents in Killeen ISD attended a town hall to voice their safety concerns. They gathered in a room at Douse Community Center, a facility on the campus of Anderson Chapel AME Church in Killeen. There, they sat on cushioned chairs, taking turns speaking into a microphone. They nodded with somber expressions and listened to each other closely. One man, wearing a maroon dress shirt, questioned why the school’s metal detectors weren’t functioning on the day of the incident.
Rodney Duckett, a community facilitator at IMPAC Outreach who helped plan the meeting, had invited the district’s superintendent, board members, and administrators — but none of them showed up.
Killeen ISD Superintendent Jo Ann Fey, Deputy Superintendent Terri Osborne, and board member Susan Jones attended subsequent town halls of the parent advocacy group, Duckett said. But the damage was already done.
“I will forever be non-forgiving for that,” Duckett told The Barbed Wire in April. “They didn’t have to say anything. They could have just listened to the concerns of the parents and made a recording of it for themselves. But the absence and silence show that they’re disconnected.”
The three district leaders, along with Karen Rudolph, the district’s executive director of communications, did not respond to The Barbed Wire’s requests for an interview. In a statement, Rudolph said: “KISD has been intensely reviewing all safety measures, has taken a number of steps and is constantly considering what else can be done to create the safest possible learning environment,” and pointed reporters to the district’s website.
After seeing the frustrations in the community, Duckett started an advocacy group to help parents collaborate on solutions and deliver them directly to district leadership.
“I’m a soldier affected by PTSD from seeing other soldiers being killed,” Duckett said. “Imagine walking down the hallway where one of your fellow classmates was killed.”
‘There Is Nothing I Can Do’
Last year, students knocked on Montgomery-Seaton’s door to alert her about a fight that broke out in the creek. A group of students surrounded another with a disability, she said. When Montgomery-Seaton went to check on the student, he was bleeding.
Montgomery-Seaton said she called the police, but they never showed up. The following week, she contacted the school.
“They told me it was a (Killeen Police Department) problem because it was off campus, so they weren’t even trying to do anything about it,” Montgomery-Seaton told The Barbed Wire in April. She said there was no clarity on how parents should navigate these situations.
At a Texas House Committee on Public Education meeting on March 20, then-KISD Superintendent Fey said House Bill 6 would “restore order” by allowing schools to discipline students for “significant misdemeanors that happen off campus.”
“Imagine telling scared students, a scared staff member, a scared parent who is bringing this to your attention, ‘I’m so sorry. It happened off campus, and there is nothing that I can do,’” Fey said, noting that campus leaders’ “hands (were) tied.”
House Bill 6 included several amendments, such as requiring affected students’ access to behavioral support services outside of the classroom. But most of the attention and policies have been focused on discipline and bans.
After the stabbing at Roy J. Smith, KISD implemented the following disciplinary actions:
- “Any student involved in fighting or assaults on campus will face disciplinary placement ranging from 45 days to 180 days, following Texas Education Code and Manifestation Determination Review (MDR) Guidelines.”
- “Any student who assaults a staff member will be placed in the District Alternative Education Program (DAEP) for a minimum of one school year.”
- “If an off-campus incident leads to or is linked to a disruption at school, the student involved will face disciplinary placement ranging from 45 days to 180 days, in accordance with state guidelines.”
KISD also enforced a clear or mesh backpack policy across campuses on May 1. Eneli, who has two children attending Harker Heights High School, found the new measure ineffective. Her fourth youngest, a senior, was approaching graduation.
“That’s a kind of tone deafness that, sometimes, I see from the administration,” Eneli said. “Because depending on what family it is, your budget, and how many children you have, you’re not trying to buy a new backpack with three weeks left in the school year.”
Lan Carter, whose child is a junior in the district, agreed that policy is an example of the district focusing on the wrong priorities.
“You can hide (a weapon) in a clear backpack,” Carter said. “It’s kind of a slippery slope. You put all these metal detectors in, you put these clear backpack policies in, and things like that. (But) you also don’t want to feel as if our kids are going to prison.”
Carter, who taught at Copperas Cove ISD years ago, is now a child and adolescent therapist. She said several of her clients are shifting their children to private schools or homeschools because they “do not feel better about safety.”
Carter recently campaigned for a position on the Killeen School Board, running on a platform of improving mental health support for students. She lost to incumbent Oliver Mintz.
After the stabbings in both Killeen and Denton, Carter believes districts across the state should adopt a uniform definition of bullying and keep detailed records of students at high-risk, or who have a history of being bullied. She proposed legislators draft a state-wide bullying law — or that the Texas Education Agency codify a standard for educators to respond to bullying, which is not currently included in the Texas Administrative Code’s ethical guide for teachers.
On June 25, Superintendent Fey announced that an internal investigation into the stabbing had concluded. Fey said the third-party investigator’s findings revealed gaps in student oversight and resulted in immediate action, per KWTX. The investigation involved hundreds of student records and emails, interviews with 25 members of Killeen ISD staff, and hours of surveillance video, the news outlet reported, and it has prompted the district to bring in additional security, including more metal detection and more adults supervising students outside of classes.
According to the district, none of the students involved in the stabbing used the district’s Bully and Threat Reporter form, though both girls’ parents have reported that their daughters endured years of bullying or felt unsafe in school. Fey told the station: “There may be information we don’t know about, but we want to be transparent in saying that to our current knowledge no bullying took place in this case.”
The Barbed Wire filed a public information request in April for complaints filed through KISD’s bullying reporting tool, as well as police records and email communication between district staff and parents regarding bullying and violence. In May, the district sent letters to the Office of the Attorney General asserting that the records were prohibited from disclosure. The office upheld the district’s assertion, and said the district must withhold the information because criminal records involving a child may not be disclosed.
In local news interviews, Fey said the district acknowledged “parents want one place to get their information” and that “we’re working towards that moving forward.”
To that end, KXXV reported last week that Killeen ISD is piloting a new feature called “Rooms” inside the district’s mobile app, where teachers can send class updates and parents can reply one-on-one with questions and concerns. Right now, it’s available at Harker Heights Elementary School and Eastern Hills Middle School.
“We listened and heard from a lot of families and community members about the need for more communication with teachers,” Rudolph, the communications director, told the news station. “This is a tool that gives families one location where they can go, have access to the teacher, and increase that communication.”
Over the summer, former Superintendent Fey resigned, just two years into the job. Fey, citing family reasons, accepted a deputy superintendent position in the much-larger Northside ISD, according to a July 23 KISD press release.
‘The District Needs Leadership’
Parents who spoke to The Barbed Wire say the district still needs to improve parent engagement and include them in discussions about safety and security measures.
Additionally, some parents feared retaliation from the district if they spoke publicly about their family’s experiences. In September 2023, Joseph Baez, who requested to transfer his son out of Skipcha Elementary School after concerns about alleged bullying from a teacher, received a letter from the district’s legal counsel urging him to “cease and desist any further defamation” of the teacher and the school’s administrators.
Baez’s claims were called “completely baseless and untrue” after the district conducted an investigation. He was also put under a two-year criminal trespass ban, which prevented him from going to board meetings and other events on district property. The Barbed Wire reviewed these documents that Baez shared, including emails between him and administrators.
Now, with the return to campus, Baez told The Barbed Wire he believes the district still has work to do, which may be harder without a steady superintendent helming the district (as of Aug. 11, Sheldon ISD superintendent King Davis took over as interim).
“For an individual in this position to leave just prior to the beginning of a new school year, to me, that’s unacceptable,” Baez told The Barbed Wire. “This is when the district needs leadership the most.”
But Baez also says parents must shoulder some of the responsibility, describing a student’s education as a “partnership” between their parents and their school. As KISD returns to school, fresh off a summer that saw parents more active than ever, one of Baez’s biggest concerns is momentum. If parents don’t continue to voice their concerns and be active in the district’s community, he said, any progress “just starts fizzling away.”
“We can have these things. Let’s have the town halls. Let’s organize these groups,” Baez said. “But if we’re going to do it, let’s do it and stay with it.
“If you don’t,” he continued, “how is the other side going to take you seriously?”
‘There Was Never Any Mental Support’
Elizabeth Jennings, who has two teenagers at Harker Heights High School, provides mental health resources and mentorship geared toward male youth through her nonprofit Boys Matter 2 Men. Jennings has attended all of the parent advocacy group’s town halls so far and collaborated with KISD at mental health fairs. Still, she and other community members mentioned a lack of counseling services and believe that current initiatives, such as the Capturing Kids’ Hearts program, do not directly tackle the district’s bullying issues.
“A lot of times, we give up when we see multiple incidents, when really, there was never any mental support to the root of what’s going on,” Jennings said. “It was only discipline.”
Susan Honaker Schenck has lived in Killeen since 1999 and said she still sees groups of children fighting as she drives down the road. Schenck said her daughter also endured physical violence from other students while attending a KISD school over 20 years ago. Now, she has one grandkid in elementary school. Schenck said talking about bullying with her grandkid is inevitable.
“It’s following a natural progression of violence, and it’s serious. It’s frustrating to me that the sweet baby lost her life,” Schenck said, referring to the tragedy at Roy J. Smith. “I never wished harm on any of the children that beat up my daughter. I never once wanted to deal with the children. I wanted the school to facilitate a meeting between me and a parent.”
For Eneli, it’s imperative that KISD and parents engage in dialogue and create committees with community members who can give their honest input. When Eneli was part of a committee over a decade ago, she never felt encouraged to ask questions, she said.
“These are not easy problems,” Eneli told The Barbed Wire. “They’re not easy challenges, and they’re challenges that are being faced by many communities that are not unique to Killeen ISD.”
Over the summer, Jennings has kept her momentum.
In the past few months, she said she pitched a mental health committee and city-wide “kindness initiative” to school administrators. The initiative is pending approval from the district, which will meet in early September. If passed, Jennings said, the program will be housed under the School Health Advisory Council.
With this new kindness program, Jennings hopes to change the tone around bullying in the district, at least in how it’s messaged to the students.
“A lot of times we set rules and consequences,” Jennings said, “and that only creates more anger, frustration, (and) fear.”
‘We Need Your Partnership’
Brand new Interim Killeen ISD Superintendent Dr. King Davis, who started his position on Aug. 11, reached out to parents in a letter on Tuesday.
But he wasn’t sharing good news — or even welcoming children back to Killeen campuses.
“We must make you aware of a very serious matter impacting our schools this week,” Davis wrote. “A pornographic video involving minors that was created outside of school has been circulated among students.”
King asked parents to inform their children about the fact that possession or distribution of child pornography is a felony, even if the kids sharing the images are themselves underaged.
“We need your partnership in stopping the spread of this harmful content and in reinforcing the seriousness of the law with your children,” said Davis.
“Our top priority is the safety and well-being of students,” he continued.