Novato’s Sinaloa Middle School was the scene of a brawl between four teenage girls Friday, which begat a mob of students stampeding the campus and sometimes trampling one another, which then begat a large meeting with irate parents Tuesday night.

This has been a pretty tempestuous end to the school year in the Bay Area on several academic levels. College commencements have been disrupted by Palestine protests, and last week we saw a shooting outside a high school graduation in Oakland. Now it's the middle schoolers seeing violent unrest close out their 2023-24 school year, as KTVU reports on a lunch period brawl at Novato’s Sinaloa Middle School last Friday, which led to a stampede and some trampling, and a Tuesday night meeting with parents who were not at all happy about the situation.

The KTVU segment above shows only a few seconds of the fight itself, which seems to just involve four girls ranging from 12 to 14 years old. "I think that all she was trying to do was defend herself and she was trying to knock away blocks and stuff but the other three were on top of her going after her and not stopping," parent Christina Carroll told KGO.

But there were apparently rumors flying around the school all day that an attack was coming, and students were amped up perhaps hoping for a front-row view. According to KTVU, the principal sent an email to parents after the incident saying that the rumors "resulted in a very large stampede of our students (several hundreds of them) rushing around the campus to seek out the fight to watch it happen. This mob grew in size as they ran through the campus, causing some students to fall and literally be run over by others."

According to KGO, school administrators anticipated the attack might come Thursday, though it did not, and they reportedly had extra security Friday when it happened.

And KGO also thinks they may have a “gotcha” that police were not notified.

"So the school district was aware but the police department wasn't?" KGO reporter J.R. Stone asked Novato Police Department captain Sasha D'Amico.

"Correct," D'Amico told the station. "So if we had been requested as part of our agreement with the school district we definitely would have been involved but that is something we need a request and need information to act on it."

It seems this was all related to bullying, and frankly, it appears that a group of girls who'd been on the wrong end of that bullying got their measure of revenge.

One parent whose daughter was arrested told KGO, "They're being told they're fat, they're ugly, their hair is ugly, balls being thrown at them every single day at school."

KGO reports that “several arrests have been made,” though it’s unclear how many students were arrested. These being middle schoolers, their names are not being released.

Related: The Kids Are Not Alright: Teens Brawling In Large Mobs at Stonestown Mall [SFist]

Image: Sinaloa Spartans PTSA Novato via Facebook