Five students allegedly assaulted Manteca High School Vice Principal Raul Maura as school was letting out at noon on the last day of the school year Friday, Manteca Police said.

Students had reportedly been hanging out on the front lawn near the Garfield Avenue side street with school staffers asking them to move on for safety reasons involving the sidewalk and the street.  A fight erupted when they refused to follow instructions and leave the campus, police said.

Officer Jason Hensley explained that School Resource Officer April Smith was on the west side of the campus on Sherman Avenue when she got the call for assistance in controlling the growing crowd and the altercation against staff.

Smith was quoted as saying she found the scene pretty chaotic as she rounded the front of the building seeing five students – two boys and three girls – assaulting the vice principal.  She called for code 3 backup and the first officer to respond was police public information officer Rex Osborn.

Osborn said he found the vice principal struggling with a teen, holding him on the ground.  The PIO took control of the situation and arrested the youth as the others reportedly ran from staffers.   Osborn noted that the initial call reported that a school official had been knocked on the ground in the fight.

Other patrolmen, school resource officers from Sierra High and East Union responded to the scene along with detectives from the police department as students ran across Yosemite Avenue toward Center Street to the north.

The five students were eventually located by officers and detained – the oldest 18-year-old senior Ronald Scott, III, - was ordered to the ground at the northeast corner of Center Street and Sherman Avenue by officers who had converged on the area and were searching for students by their physical sizes and clothing descriptions.

All five students were booked into the Manteca city jail charged with assaulting a school administrator on a school campus.  They were given citations and later released to their parents and will later appear in juvenile court.   The disposition of the 18-year-old senior was unclear.  It was reported that he hadn’t gone through graduation exercises Thursday night.