Parents and students of North Penn School District in North Wales, Pennsylvania, called out teachers and administrators after a transgender student, a biological male identifying as a female, brutally beat an unidentified middle school girl with a Stanley cup in the school cafeteria last week.

The victim was hit so severely that she was hospitalized due to a head injury.

Emily, a female student at Pennbrook Middle School and a friend of the victim, told the school board last Thursday that she was “second on his hit list” and recounted that she had begged for help from school officials numerous times before the attack.

“Wednesday morning, I went to the guidance counselor and told her, since I was second on the hit list, knowing that something was going to happen because there was a girl she was targeting every day at lunch. And they would go to the counselor and tell them every day that this is going to happen,” she said.

The student continued, “And Wednesday, I went with two others, and each of us filled out a whole paper full of what’s going to happen and why it’s going to happen.”

She shared that after reporting their concerns, she received a warning to “watch her back” because “he is going to come for you and the other girl at lunch.”

The student said she was “terrified” and told guidance counselor Colleen Fattori again about her concerns.

“I told Miss Fattori that that was happening and she said, ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s not going to happen,’” the student claimed the counselor said

The girl then described witnessing a bloody attack by the transgender student attacking her friend in the cafeteria.

“I was in lunch and all of the sudden, I hear all of this screaming and everybody running. And I see Mel running in after somebody, and everyone’s screaming and running,” she described the beginning of the incident.

She said the attacker went after the victim who was “faced backwards” and didn’t see the student coming up behind her.

“All of the sudden, you just hear these terrible, like, loud bangs of the Stanley bouncing off her head. And then you see Mel grabbing her hair and hitting her against the table, and just repeatedly hitting her with the Stanley,” the student told the school board.

She added, “There was blood going everywhere. I was at the table right behind and all you see is blood everywhere.”

The Pennbrook student shared that the seventh grade assailant repeatedly yelled, “I’m going to murder you” while hitting her friend’s head with the cup.

She grew tearful as she described seeing her friend’s blood being cleaned up off the tables and ground.

“We had to watch them take her out with blood dripping down her face and I will never forget that,” she cried.

She said the attack went on in front of the students for 28 minutes. However, the school district claims that security cameras revealed that the incident lasted eight minutes. At the school board meeting, the student disputed the school’s claim of “eight minutes” because she “timed it.” Parents at the meeting demanded to see the security tape to verify the claims of the school.

The middle school student said she laid awake in her bed that night upset that they “shouldn’t have had to” witness the attack.

“I don’t get it. You could have stopped it. It was five hours from when I told you it was going to happen… it was five whole hours. I don’t get how you couldn’t have stopped that,” she demanded at the board meeting.

She said the guidance counselor had assured her that the attack was “not going to happen” because they had the trans-identifying student “under control,” to which the student pointedly said to the school board, “Clearly, you didn’t.”

A Pennbrook student’s mother, Alyssa Santiago, confirmed to a local radio show that the violent student was known to be a biological male and there were yearbook photos of the student before transitioning to a transgender female.

The mother said the transgender student had been transferred to the school “two days” before the incident happened on Wednesday and by Tuesday, the students knew of a “hit list.”

“I would say by Tuesday lunch time, everybody in the school knew that my daughter was going to be ‘curb stomped’ or made to ‘bite the curb’ or jumped,” she said of the “school talk” prior to the attack.

Another mother told the school board that the transgender student “had multiple reports of violence” and she didn’t understand how that went unchecked.

“As a parent, your worst fear comes to light when you get that call from your kid crying, ‘Help, Mom! I’m scared. There’s blood everywhere!’ And you can’t get to them fast enough. And they hang up on you because teachers and staff are yelling at them to hang up their phones, not to call their parents,” she tearfully said to the board. “I told my child to always call me in an emergency no matter what.”

The mother demanded that the board assure her that this student does not return to their school because this is “not the student’s first violent attack.”

She recounted how parents from numerous other local schools have dealt with this student’s “documented violence,” both in and out of school. The mother claimed that the student had violently attacked another student in an elementary school.

During the meeting, School Superintendent Todd Bauer called the attack “deeply disturbing.”

“This was avoidable and the district truly failed to protect the students at Pennbrook,” a parent said. “What are we supposed to say to our children after this? How do I send him back to school?”

Nick Taylor, Pennbrook Middle School principal, sent a letter to parents saying that, “the safety of our students is of the utmost importance… I ask that parents speak with their children about the consequences of fighting.”

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Pennbrook parent Stephanie Palovcak clapped back at the principal’s comment.

“This isn’t a fight. This is an assault,” Palovcak said.

Drivers using the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission’s Route 78 bridge between New Jersey and Pennsylvania are in for some closed lanes during two overnight periods this week that is a prelude to a bigger construction project.

Parts of the Route 78 toll bridge approach roadway segments in New Jersey and Pennsylvania will be closed during between Thursday night into Friday morning.

Between 8 p.m. Thursday, April 25, to 5 a.m. Friday, April. 26, the Route 78 east center and right lanes will be closed for pothole repairs from the Morgan Hill Road/Route 78 interchange (Exit 75) in Pennsylvania to the routes 22 and 173/Route 78 interchange(Exit 3) in New Jersey. One lane will remain open.

Between 10 p.m. Thursday, April 25, to 7 a.m. Friday, April 26, the Route 78 west center and right lanes will be closed for pothole repairs from the routes 22 and 173/Route 78 Exit 3 interchange in New Jersey to the Route 78 bridge at the Delaware River. One lane will be open.

These closed lanes are the first part of a year-long, $23 million Route 78 New Jersey Roadway Rehabilitation and Power and Communications-Infrastructure Improvements Project being done by the Crisdel Group, Inc. of South Plainfield.

That New Jersey segment was rehabilitated between 2007 and 2009 and is deteriorating, despite a series of stop-gap asphalt joint replacements and pothole repair projects over the past five years, officials said.

The project involves milling the old pavement off they highway and repaving work, including the three commission owned ramps at Exit 3. Highway shoulders will be resurfaced and have rumble strips installed. The highway lanes will be re-striped and Route 78 Toll Bridge’s concrete road deck and 14 other Commission-owned approach bridges in Pennsylvania and New Jersey will be sealed, officials said.

The project also includes upgrading the Commission’s security camera network on the Route 78 bridge and the commission’s Route 78 approach 4.2-mile highway segment in New Jersey and 2.25-mile section in Pennsylvania.

Drivers should anticipate minor slowdowns and backups and reduce speeds in active construction zones or restricted travel areas.

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Larry Higgs may be reached at lhiggs@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on X @CommutingLarry

This story originally appeared on Spotlight PA.

Election experts in Pennsylvania expect largely smooth sailing at the polls this week, anticipating the unofficial results for most races on the April 23 ballot will be available on election night.

Pennsylvania has been holding elections using no-excuse mail voting since 2019, and the state has steadily moved from persistent delays in reporting results to relatively quick turnarounds. This has been accomplished mostly thanks to workers’ increasing familiarity with the mail process, and state grants allowing counties to upgrade their equipment.

“I would expect almost all counties to be able to report an overwhelming number of those ballots on election night,” said Jeff Greenburg, a former Mercer County election director who now works for the good-government group Committee of Seventy. He added that “there could be a few that stretch into Wednesday.”

On the ballot are candidates for president and U.S. Senate, though those races are essentially decided on both sides of the aisle. More lively are the races for Pennsylvania’s three row offices: both the Democratic and Republican attorney general primaries have multiple candidates, and there are competitive Democratic primaries for treasurer and auditor general.

The state House and Senate are also full of races to watch.

Final outcomes for most of the races in both chambers will be decided in the primary, thanks in part to legislative maps that have created a relatively small number of truly swingable districts. Races to watch include those of state House Minority Leader Bryan Cutler, who is being challenged from the right for his Lancaster County district, and Democratic state Rep. Amen Brown, who faces two challengers to his left in a West Philly district that has in recent years seen repeated turnover in its representation.

As of Friday morning, the Pennsylvania Department of State had approved nearly 896,000 applications for mail ballots; it approved 1.82 million during the presidential primary in 2020. That year, just under 80% of voters returned those mail ballots, according to the department.

Voters who have already filled out and returned their mail ballots may have noticed several changes from previous years. The department put these in place to cut down on common ballot errors like failing to sign or date them, misdating them, or forgetting to use an interior secrecy envelope, according to Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt.

“Since the 2020 election cycle, thousands of mail ballots have not been able to be counted because of errors that voters made while completing their mail ballots,” Schmidt said in one of several recent, daily updates on election preparations.

The redesigned ballots include an instruction sheet that has graphics. The interior secrecy envelope is now yellow, which Schmidt says is intended to distinguish it more clearly from the outer envelope. The outer envelope also has a colored stripe to help the Postal Service identify election mail, and it includes a revised section for dating and signing the ballot that highlights where these elements must go.

The redesign also is in part an acknowledgment of the state laws and court rulings currently dictating Pennsylvania’s mail voting rules.

The handling of undated and misdated ballots, in particular, is still under active litigation. The most recent decision on the subject saw a three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rule that ballots must be properly dated. If a voter fails to date an outer ballot envelope or writes a clearly incorrect date, such as their birthday, counties must reject the ballot.

Voting rights groups are appealing the ruling on the grounds that a missing or incorrect date is an immaterial error, and that rejecting these ballots disenfranchises eligible voters. However, the status quo will not change before the primary election.

There also remain several areas of state law in which there is no consistent statewide rule. Counties can decide whether to offer remote drop boxes for mail ballot returns. And they can decide whether to offer ballot curing, in which election officials notify voters of mail ballot mistakes before Election Day.