The following is a direct quote from an e-mail sent to the Palo Alto High School staff by Principal Jacqueline McEvoy at about 6 p.m. on Thursday.

Thanks for being patient. I know the rumors are flying so I wanted to
give you a summary of where we are regarding the Egg Wars. There were
about 50 students involved. We have probably interviewed around 20-25
students. There was about $1500 of damage done to the Gunn campus.
Based on the level of involvement of students on a case by case basis,
about 12 students were suspended for one or two days. A number of
students will be doing community service (including some of the
suspended students). Student leadership (some of whom were involved) is
working on the reconciliation piece with Gunn. We will be going over to
Gunn tomorrow to meet with the Administration.

And, yes, we did involve both the PAPD and Stanford in trying to prevent
this from happening. We found out about this bad practice last year
when Stanford contacted us about the damage to its campus and we
confirmed that there had been student injuries. We are committed to the
physical and emotional safety of our students. So are the police.
Unfortunately, our students chose to ignore our warnings as well as
those from the police.

Incidents like this are regrettable but here’s what I know. We have
great kids who sometimes make mistakes. As always, we will work with
them to minimize the impact that the suspensions have and we do a pretty
good job with that.

According to McEvoy, the numbers mentioned in this release are an estimate. Also, the administration’s investigations are ongoing; more suspensions may occur, McEvoy said. According to Assistant Principal Jerry Berkson, the administration has reduced all five-day suspensions to one or two days.