Madison School District officials on Wednesday said a video posted on YouTube, a popular Internet video site, helped them identify students involved in two fights at Toki Middle School.

Two girls were involved in each fight, and in addition to punishing the students involved in the fight, district officials might discipline whoever recorded it.

Officials say they believe it would mark the first case in which a Madison student is disciplined for making a recording at school.

Administrators in several other local school districts said the Madison YouTube videos are part of a rapid, unpredictable shift in the way technology is affecting schools.

"The whole electronic age blurs the line between things going on inside vs. outside school," Sun Prairie Superintendent Tim Culver said. "It's an interesting new era we're entering."

Administrators interviewed Wednesday said they haven't experienced any similar problems with YouTube videos — but some already are making plans for how to respond if it happens.

"Everybody knows it's out there," said Monona Grove High School Assistant Principal Dave O'Connell. "In terms of something shot at school, how we would handle that situation, it's something we've talked about."

Students disciplined

The Madison students involved in the Toki fights are being disciplined and could face suspension or expulsion for fighting, depending upon the outcome of school investigations, said district spokesman Ken Syke.

The video has been removed from YouTube and Syke said the district doesn't know who posted it there.

District officials are trying to figure out who recorded the fight, Syke said, because district policy bars recordings without students' consent. A reason for the policy, he said, is to preserve students' privacy.

Syke said police were called to the school last Thursday and Friday because of fights, each of them involving two girls. The students suffered "cuts, scrapes, maybe some bruises" but didn't require hospitalization, he said.

But Syke wasn't sure whether the YouTube videos involved those fights.

Last month, district officials strengthened security, including adding a second security guard and a dean of students, to calm concerns from Toki staff members and parents that the building is becoming too chaotic.

Parents and staff have cited profanity, signs of disrespect from some students and fights as problems at the West Side school.

Bigger problems

The state Department of Public Instruction keeps no data that would show whether videos shot in schools are becoming a problem, agency spokesman Patrick Gasper said.

"A lot of people have heard of videos of students fighting being posted across the country," he said. "It's certainly interesting when it hits a little closer to home now."

In Monona Grove, O'Connell said, school officials would work to get a video removed and would punish students if any of their actions on the video violated school or athletic code rules. That would be similar to what's already being done when photos of underage drinking show up on student profiles created for the popular social networking sites MySpace or Facebook, O'Connell said.

Monona Grove High School doesn't have a policy against recordings made on school property, perhaps because the issue has never come up, O'Connell said. The school's most pressing problem with electronic communications, he said, has to do with students spending too much time on school computers viewing MySpace or Facebook or other inappropriate sites.

"That's the big battle," O'Connell said. "Instead of having educationally rich time on the computer, they're doing that. We do have a block on school computers for those sites, but kids know how to get around the filters."

Similarly, Middleton High School Assistant Principal Rocky Falcone said MySpace and Facebook were bigger problems at his school than YouTube. Students can get into trouble with their sites if photos depict actions that break school rules or are otherwise objectionable.

"We get a lot of complaints" about those sites, Falcone said. "We'll usually work with parents if there's something offensive and talk with MySpace and Facebook to take it down."

Falcone said he would use the same approach if an inappropriate YouTube video was posted, noting unauthorized recording inside the school is against policy.

Food for thought

Falcone, who is in charge of school safety, was able to watch the Madison video with the school's police liaison Wednesday before it was taken down. He said seeing it would provide more food for thought about the issue, noting school officials had met with local police chiefs just last week to talk about "what we would do" if parents or students used their cell-phone cameras to record a dangerous situation such as a fight at the school.

In Sun Prairie, Culver said officials there had just been talking about whether to allow students to use YouTube videos for class projects. Like the other districts, Culver said the problem of a YouTube video shot inside the school hasn't come up yet, noting the school had more problems with students posting nasty things about other students on their MySpace or Facebook profiles.

"Then there's a hassle about it between kids here, but it starts on the Internet," Culver said, adding that offending students often try to argue that they shouldn't be punished by the school because they created the profile at home.