This is interesting. I guess by the standards of other posts, our high school had some odd policies, but to us, they were normal:
– We could leave school grounds at any time. Lunch did not have to be taken at school. If you lived close enough, you could go home; or if you preferred, you could go to KFC or McDonald’s or the coffee shop across the street.
– Our smoking area was “anywhere that wasn’t inside the school.” Yep, in the football stands, outside the main entrance, under the trees on the front lawn. Students regularly had packs of smokes in their shirt pockets in class. Still, some got busted for smoking in washrooms. Given the freedom to smoke outside, smoking inside was a big no-no.
– Those over 18 enjoyed a special status–they could write their own notes for absences, for example. They were adults in the eyes of the law, and so the school couldn’t do much to them for things that younger students would get hammered for (lateness, for example). When you hit 18, you knew the school couldn’t touch you.
– Students were expected to make their own way to and from school. No yellow school buses for us. If you couldn’t walk or bike or drive, there was public transit; and the city bus stopped at the school. Few parents in those days drove their kids to school; and those few that were driven by parents, were laughed at.
Our high school used to chain up the fire exits to keep people from skipping out. I never had any trouble walking right out the main entrance.
They never called a snow day–even on days the buses couldn’t make it up the road to the school. Typically, these were days when our parents kept us home because the roads weren’t safe, and we went out and played ice hockey in the street.
At the end of the year when you took half-day tests, you had to spend the other half of the day in the gym doing nothing. (Or you skipped out through the front door. They had gym teachers stationed at the entry roads to head people back, but you could go out through the woods.)
They allowed no early graduation–you served your four years no matter what.
All this because the school district got $X for every full day a student was actually there, and they weren’t letting any of that money (and the patronage power it gave them) slip out of their hands.
This was in a well-to-do and highly reputed school district in the early 70s.
I graduated from high school in 1989 in Texas (suburban Dallas-Fort Worth).
Boys were not allowed to wear shorts to school - period. It became so ingrained that it really felt weird when I went to college - being allowed to wear shorts to class was quite a novelty!
Girls may not have been able to wear short pants, either - I don’t recall - but they could wear skirts of some unrecalled minimum length.
My guess is that their skirts had to be at their fingertips (when their arms were down at their sides) or lower. Or that if they kneeled on the floor, the hemline would at least touch the ground.
Just as I felt when I got to college and saw an ashtray on the back of every third seat or so in the lecture halls. But they had introduced a classroom smoking ban effective that Fall, which was in 1975.
We had the student smoking area at my high school, too. You had to be eighteen or older though, so it wouldn’t have applied to me; I was only seventeen when I finished HS.
I don’t know when they stopped allowing students to smoke in the lecture halls at UWM (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee) but when I went there for Summer School around 2000 or 2001 you could still smoke in the Union.
My suburban Connecticut high school had a rule against joining fraternities (and still does; I just checked the online copy of the student handbook). Which was odd, I thought, as I never heard of a high school fraternity. Also, you’re not allowed to go off campus during the school day. Twenty years ago, when I was there, this wouldn’t have mattered as the closest place you could go to off-campus for lunch was a sandwich shop about five miles and ten minutes away. I have no idea if there are any restaurants any closer now.
Did the administration and teachers refer to the students as “men and women”? If this was high school, as I assume, then that in itself must have been rather unusual too.
I went to UCSD; California generally has been ahead of other jurisdiction in smoking restrictions. Interesting–there’s a 26 year difference here. I smoked a little in my college days; during the years I was at UCSD, roughly 1975 to 1980, I saw the beginnings of the general turn against smoking. They stopped selling cigs in the stores, and by the time I was a senior there were only about two cigarette machines left on campus. You could still smoke just about everywhere outside of class, though.
I started grad school in 1982 at UCLA, and at that time they eliminated tobacco sales, and banned smoking from most or all indoor areas. I imagine that students living in dorms could still smoke there if the room or floor wasn’t designated nonsmoking, but I didn’t know any to ask.
Really? My high school’s rulebook referred to the students as men and women. I didn’t know this was unusual.
Unusual: Men’s hair could not touch their collar. If it did (and it often did) they would be called into the dean’s office for a little session with the shears by the dean, who was not notably gifted in the area of cutting hair, which was possibly the reason she chose to become a high-school dean in the first place.
My high school’s tardy policy started out being pretty lenient. I forget exactly what it was, but you could be tardy about 8 times before anything could truly affect you (you were placed on a P+ system, where you’d get either a Pass or a Fail…so, the equivalent of a C or an F…no matter how well you did in a class). The beginning of my sophomore year, they did a complete overhaul of the system. If you were tardy three times (or truant once), it was an automatic 1/3 grade deduction. If you were tardy another three times, it was another 1/3 deduction. And so on, until you flunked the class. They also automatically called home if you were truant.
I never had a problem with it, but I talked to a lot of kids from other schools and they thought it was pretty strict.
In elementary school: I don’t remember recess ever being canceled (or held inside) due to cold, and we had plenty of -20 C days. Invariably, you had to go outside because it was essential to “get some fresh air”. But the slightest bit of drizzle meant we had to stay in the gym or lunchroom for recess. Apparently the air ceased to be fresh when it was moistened.
In my city they made excessive truancy illegal. After a certain amount of missed classes you were reported to the police and if the cops were to catch you out and about you’d get picked up for it.
Every year, from 1st grade through 6th, we spent a couple of weeks learning square dancing in P.E. I still don’t know why.
My 5th grader tells me that it’s against the rules at her school (elementary - the 5th graders are the oldest students) to date. Since at this age “dating” pretty much consists of declaring “Dylan is my boyfriend!” and then sitting together at lunch and walking together at recess this puzzled me, until my daughter explained that these “relationships” typically last a couple of days, and then this one would talk smack about that one or that one would start two-timing this one and everybody would choose sides and gossip shrilly about each other for a day or so and then the whole cycle would start all over again with a new couple. According to my daughter the teachers finally got sick of all the drama and pronounced dating a no-no.
Of course the kids are still “dating”, they’re just being a lot more quiet about it. Which is probably all the teachers wanted in the first place.