An agreement aimed at tackling negative attention to schools from pupil misbehaviour on social media has been developed by a secondary association and police.
The memorandum of understanding, currently in draft form, was spurred on by events late last year when a number of schools hit the headlines after videos and photographs appeared on social media - including a group of boys who performed lewd acts on drunk girls and posted the pictures on Facebook.
The case - dubbed Roast Busters II - involved senior boys from an unnamed New Zealand secondary school plying young girls with alcohol and recording sexually degrading acts, including dangling their genitalia over their faces, in a competition to see how many girls they could get into compromising photos.
A number of fights between school pupils, which took place outside school but in school uniforms, also made it into the news in October and November. The incidents spurred the Secondary Principals' Association of New Zealand (Spanz) to meet with police, and a memorandum of understanding has this month been preliminarily agreed to. It is understood that all Spanz's executive members agreed to the MOU at a meeting at the start of this month.
Police and Spanz declined to provide the Herald with a copy of the MOU, saying it was still in draft form. But it is understood the agreement will be finalised by the end of the month.