Way back when “Streaking” was a thing, well, it was a thing in our schools. Good times!
Where did you go to school? In my small rural high school, fights in the hall was a weekly occurrence at least.
The husband of one of the special ed teachers used to hire her retarded male students to help with household projects like painting. One day she came home early to discover her husband and one of her students having sex by the pool. She called the police and the story was all over the news by the next day.
All boys Catholic school, how exciting could it have been.
A guy in my class had been missing from school for about a week and the priest was getting more and more pissed with each passing day. Finally, the guy’s body was discovered. He’d been murdered in a drug deal gone bad. The next morning it was the talk of the school.
1st period roll call
Priest: “LeBlanc, LeBlanc.”
Everyone looks at each other.
Priest: “Mr. LeBlanc better have a damn good excuse for all these absences!”
Class: “He’s dead!!”
-
Music teacher was using cocaine to lose weight. He’d come into class 5 minutes late, rubbing his nose on a Monday. “Wow, it’s already Thursday and we haven’t practiced this piece yet.”
-
Science teacher used to mention how he’d grade our homework and tests at a local bar and those at the bottom of the pile might get better grades .
When I was in 6th grade, around 1962 or '63, a boy named G. in the year above me burned down two elementary schools and the middle school. His M.O. was to break into the building carrying with him an old toaster and a pocketful of wood shavings. He would fill the bread slots of the toaster with the shavings, pile papers and books around it, plug it in, and run away before the ensuing blaze caught up to him.
G. was only caught because, while setting his third fire, he stopped to write, “I hate you, Mr. Perry” on a blackboard in a middle school classroom. The fire department managed to put the flames out before it reached the blackboard and G. was id’d through his handwriting.
Mr. Perry is dead now (I liked him) but G. lives on. Word was that he was sent to a psychiatric facility for emotionally disturbed youth. I don’t don’t how long he stayed in custody but some of my friends back in the old hometown see him occasionally, walking around the town center aimlessly and looking glassy-eyed. People who greet him say he’s inarticulate and only grunts in reply. There’s speculation that he may have undergone a lobotomy.
This one time? This one girl said this other girl’s boyfriend had totally offered her a joint at the school dance? And the one girl was like :mad: and she said no way and the other girl was just jealous? And the other girl was like :rolleyes: and she was all, uh, no one in the whole entire world would be jealous of your idiot stoner boyfriend? And everyone took sides and then someone told her mum :smack: and her mum told the nuns and they were like :eek: and called everyone in and interrogated them and it was this huge big deal for like DAYS.
Our high school was not high-drama.
In primary school, though, a kid got killed by a hippo.
Had a first-year English teacher who put on an Army jacket to take roll. We were required to answer “Sir, here, sir!” I should point out that he was a typical liberal arts type with shaggy hair who had not, as far as I know, served. It was just his running gag.
So I learned to answer in about sixteen different languages. Ran out when the school library collection of dictionaries did.
Flynn got him, though. “Flynn?” “Here.” (Big intake of breath throughout classroom.) “FLYNN!” (pause) “Still here.”
Boy, this thread makes me realize how boring our school was. Outside the occasional pregnancy rumor I can’t think of hardly anything.
Oh, once there were these three kids (I was friends with one of them) who tried to make a pipe bomb by filling a piece of lead pipe with match heads. I guess they were pounding them in and the bomb went off in their hands. They all sustained non-severe burns and shrapnel injuries except for the kid who was actually holding the pipe - he lost half his hand.
A year before the official unsealing in '87, some idiots looted a time capsule that had been buried when the school first opened its doors in '62. IIRC, the same idiots also emptied all the fire extinguishers.
There was a cheating scandal that involved the student body president. I, too, went to a boring school.
And this is why you shouldn’t keep hippos at a primary school.
When I was in 5th grade, a school bus driver had a fatal heart attack as he was driving a bus full of kids home (and, for the record, I was one of the kids on the bus). He was headed into an intersection at the time, aimed straight at a white church building that was one of the town’s iconic structures. An 11 year old student in the front row of seats realized what was going on, jumped up and hit the brakes in time to stop the bus from crashing. Next day, he was in newspapers in nearly every part of the world.
^I hope that wasn’t the 11 year old’s high point in life. I mean it’s an insanely high event, but achieving it at 11, how do you top it ever?
If this is the story I think it is, it didn’t happen all that long ago.
There was a shooting at my junior high in 1972, several years before I went there. A boy who was being bullied brought a rifle to school and fired several shots, all of them into a wall, before he was tackled by a teacher (who was granted a LOA for the rest of the year). No injuries, except for a few kids who had minor cuts and scraped when they jumped out a first-floor window, and I never knew about it until I read about it on that school’s Facebook page.
Probably not the incident you’re thinking of; mine happened in 1961.
Something like that happened at the rehearsal for my high school graduation. One of my classmates had died in a car accident the weekend before. When they were doing the practice roll call, the principal accidentally called his name. There was an awkward silence and one person called out “I don’t think he’s coming.”
Well, my kids get to forevermore top everyone in “how bad was your junior high?”
A horror movie was filmed at theirs. 
If TV is any indicator, he’ll make it happen again by causing a Metro bus driver’s coronary and then saving the day. Then a series of them. Then Rizzoli and Isles will step in and Angela will be on the bus when they break the case. Then Sandra Bullock will have to make sure the bus doesn’t go slower than 50 MPH as Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern try to find the assassin during a high-speed car chase. Then…
My stories are the normal drama/trauma stories.
The Fella lived thru this:
Which one?
Nothing while I was there but in 1967, there was The Third Wave experiment.