New Orleans Mother Slams KIPP Morial After Viral Bus Bullying Video

Dionne Conerly is weighing whether to take her son’s beating to the New Orleans Police Department after a video showed an older student punching her fifth-grader repeatedly on a school bus—an attack school officials knew about for nearly a week without ever calling her. The Oct. 30 assault on Karmelo McCoi, captured on a cellphone and viewed roughly 40,000 times in 20 minutes before it was deleted, has reignited a years-long debate over whether New Orleans charter schools should place adult monitors on the yellow buses that carry children across the city on lengthy rides, The Lens reported.

Forty Thousand Views in Twenty Minutes

Conerly first learned of the attack Tuesday night when a video surfaced on social media showing an older student grabbing, pushing and repeatedly punching her son on the bus ride home from KIPP Morial in New Orleans East. The footage spread rapidly, garnering about 40,000 views in 20 minutes before the person who posted it deleted it at Conerly’s request. The boy in the video is Conerly’s 10-year-old son; the student doing the punching appears to be in seventh or eighth grade.

The bullying had been building for weeks, Conerly said, without any intervention from the school reaching her. Karmelo told her the trouble started on the morning bus ride on Oct. 30. He reported it to a teacher, who issued a verbal warning to the older child at lunchtime. That afternoon, Conerly’s 6-year-old daughter—who also rides the bus—told her mother that the two boys began exchanging words before the bus even departed the school. It quickly turned physical.

“He waited till that evening when they got on the bus and he beat my child up,” Conerly said.

A Week of Silence

Conerly questioned Karmelo about the incident Wednesday morning and learned the fight took place nearly a week prior, on Oct. 30. Her son had reported the incident to the school, yet she was never notified. When she spoke with KIPP Morial officials Wednesday, she pressed them on why neither child was removed from the bus and why parents were not called immediately.

“I asked them, if a bus driver called you on the bus and said two kids had a fight, why weren’t they both removed off the bus and parents called right then and there?” Conerly said. “They said because it didn’t seem like it was a big deal. But as you see from the video, it’s a big deal.”

The bus driver alerted a school dean who boarded to investigate but did not remove either student, Conerly’s daughter told her. The only remedy the school offered was a four-day suspension for the other student. Under NOLA Public Schools guidelines, a suspended child cannot return until after a parent-teacher conference; some schools also ban students from buses for misbehavior. The other child did not attend school Wednesday, apparently because of the shared video.

Conflicting Accounts

When Conerly spoke with the owner of Hammond’s Transportation, the company that provides buses for KIPP New Orleans, she received a version of events that contradicted the school’s account. The owner told her he was informed that both children had been removed from the bus, and that the incident had happened over a month ago. Neither KIPP New Orleans nor Hammond’s Transportation responded to requests for comment.

The Long Ride Problem

The incident lands amid a recurring demand from New Orleans parents: that all schools provide bus monitors to ride along with children. Because each charter school can enroll students from across the city and must provide yellow-bus transportation from home, the rides can stretch for long stretches with younger children sharing space with older students. After periodic bus incidents, parents have repeatedly pushed for adult supervision on those routes.

“Just imagine if my child would have gotten injured, came home and committed suicide or went to sleep and never woke up, we wouldn’t have known anything until today,” she said.

Karmelo is left feeling embarrassed and humiliated. He doesn’t want to go back to school, his mother said, and she worries the bullying could escalate as the video continues to circulate.