School officials are waiting for the full story before taking action against a student accused of stabbing another girl at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School on Tuesday, Superintendent Jeffrey Young said.

An argument in a first-period class resulted in a minor stab wound to the shoulder of a young student from a knife used by Jasmine Genty, 19, of Pleasant Street, police said. The victim got several stitches at a local hospital and was released, while Genty was taken into custody on charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and carrying a dangerous weapon on school grounds and was to be arraigned at Cambridge District Court.

“They took her out of school and they’re the ones who will handle the first level of investigation,” Young said of the police. “There will be a sort of concurrent investigation that goes on” within the district.

“I don’t want to speculate about discipline until we’ve really investigated the whole matter and understand what precipitated it, how it came to be and exactly what transpired. We work with the police to assemble the full factual story,” Young said.

“Suffice it to say, it’s very serious and not at all typical of what happens in that community,” he said.

That might be an understatement. Young didn’t know of similar incidents in the five years he’d been in the district, and Jeremy Warnick, a police spokesman who started with the department March 17, said his initial research had to go all the way back to 1980 to find a stabbing at the high school – and that was a different kind of incident altogether.

In the incident 34 years ago, 17-year-old Anthony Colosimo died after a brawl among six male students that one school official called “racially motivated.” Colosimo and two friends in the fight – one of whom was stabbed but survived – were white; the other side in the fight, including the 16-year-old charged with his stabbing, were black. The school closed for a day while police looked for suspects.

Officials called Tuesday’s incident an argument between two girls that escalated overnight and burst into violence at about 8:10 a.m.

“The whole things happened in a minute or two. It was very quickly broken up by teachers and deans who came running as well as students who helped separate the girls,” Young said.

Warnick said school security and a Cambridge police officer assigned to the school were able to intervene quickly, provide medical assistance and arrest the suspect.

Genty was taken to an office where she was interviewed by CRLS administration as well as the Cambridge Police Department, while the victim of the stabbing was taken for medical care.

The knife used in the stabbing was “like a steak knife kind of thing,” Young said.