A 16-year-old student hung himself from the parallel bars in my high school yard. He did it at night, and the school staff found him in the morning.
In the year above me, there was a student who was the daughter of a very senior government minister.
One day, The Sun newspaper did a major exposé on her, apparently living with a rent boy in a squat (she’d recently left the school under mysterious circumstances). We were all instructed to ‘under no circumstances, buy or read the Sun’, which of course we promptly all did.
In the last year of secondary school (used to be called ‘5th year’ - I think that’s ‘Year 11’ now; this was in the early 1980s), three kids - two male and one female, decided they would run away together and start a new life in London.
They were amongst the oldest in the cohort - age 16 I think - and were known throughout the school as the leaders of the more rebellious element - these were the kids that were going out at lunchtime shoplifting, they could be relied upon to be defiant and disruptive in class, brought knives and other forbidden items into school, smoked at the back of the playing field, bullied other kids, etc.
Their plan was apparently that they would run off to London, find a vacant property and squat there; the story that circulated from people who were closest to them was that the girl was going to earn money through prostitution, the guys were going to do petty crime and the like - to earn enough money to get set up for a better life. They just walked out of the school grounds one break time and disappeared…
…until the following day. The police apparently picked them up on the Isle of Wight which is actually more or less the opposite direction from London, and about a quarter of the distance. Not sure if the London thing was just a bluff story to throw people off the trail. Not sure what they intended to do on the island either.
There were a few other scandals - one kid blew his hand up trying to make pipe bombs, for example.
My senior year in high school, my friend/classmate Bob got pulled over with a case of beer in his car. Bob was a football star and the arrest would mean he’d be off the team. His dad was abusive and would not take this well.
Bob totally lost it. The cop was brand new, it was literally his first night working. Bob hit the cop; knocking him out cold, then drove off.
Bob stopped at my house, afraid to go home, assuming the police would be waiting there for him. He considered suicide, but eventually went home to find all was quiet. He thought maybe he killed the cop.
And that’s it. In the tiny rural town, the cop was too embarrassed to pursue the situation. I guess he made up a story for his black eye/swollen nose. Bob had a few sleepless nights, but that was it.
My chemistry teacher married one of his students soon after she graduated. And my English teacher married the band teacher.
Pretty tame by today’s standards, but fifty years ago it was scandalous.
Not my school, but my little brother’s elementary school:
One of the teachers was arrested for sexually abusing his own children. Not students, though.
A few years before I attended a girl was raped in the high school. It was either in a secluded stairwell or an empty room.
The judge presiding the case got recalled over his remarks. Archie E. Simonson, Plaintiff-appellant, v. United Press International, Inc., and the Associated Press,inc., Defendants-appellees, 654 F.2d 478 (7th Cir. 1981) :: Justia
My school 40+ years ago: Teacher was sexually abusing students who were receiving after school 1-one-1 tutoring. His tutoring service still had a waiting list because his students got top marks on A-levels.
My kid’s school a couple of years ago: Principal was banging one of the teachers. Superintendent was aware of this for months, probably years. His solution was that all personnel decisions relating to that teacher were to be made by the Asst. Superintendent, not the school principal. Principal was dismissed but found a new position almost immediately.
When I was a high school sophomore, circa 1968-69, it was rumored that one of the senior girls was having an affair with a teacher, who might have been in his 30s. The year after she graduated, she had a baby, rumored to be his. I remember thinking Oh come ON! and dismissed the whole thing. I never gave him, or her, any more thought, until I saw his death notice in the newspaper, maybe 30 years later. As it turns out, they were married, and had been for decades.
Calumny of Bestiality, anyone? An inoffensive young man was seen, “no shit we all saw it,” sunlit buttocks in the middle of a pasture on a stool having intercourse with a dairy cow. (not in the privacy of the milking stall where the cow couldn’t walk away, where stools could be expected to be found: nope, right out in view of the road). When his name was called at our HS graduation ceremony, the stands resonated with jocular mooing. Hateful, hateful little Wisconsin town.
A teacher was getting rather too intimately close with one of his students, who was 17 at the time. He was quietly removed. It wasn’t illegal (age of consent in NZ is 16), but it was very much counter to the High School’s ethics.
Mid 70s, freshman year. Girl informs BF she’s pregnant, he says not my problem, she shoots him (dead) on the quad. Police called, etc. etc. No classes cancelled, no lockdowns, no counselors… nothing changed except yellow tape around the area for a few days. Then the incident was pretty much forgotten and not even mentioned in the school paper or annual. I don’t recall seeing it on the news, but I’m not certain whether it was covered locally.
Different time back then.
We had a charismatic and well-liked math teacher, who was married and had a kid he talked about all the time. He was also the coach of the girls’ basketball team. Yep, he was having sex with one of the students on the team.
When I was in fourth grade, I went to a private Baptist school. For some reason, that year our class couldn’t keep a teacher. We had three or four of them over the course of the year. One was a very nice lady, but she quit abruptly in tears one day after overhearing some of the boys say that she shouldn’t be teaching us because she was a Jew.
A girl I knew in high school used to call in bomb threats during summer school. That would get us all taken outside for a free hour or so.
Those are about all the worst things I can think of.
When I mentioned the streaking incident at my high school earlier, I was only thinking about scandals which were known about by everyone at the time. Reading additional responses here, about sexual misconduct, reminded me that we had that, too, though it wasn’t generally known until years later.
We were a Catholic high school, operated by the Norbertine Order of priests, and it came out, several years after I graduated, that one of the priests who taught at the school, as well as a “frater” (seminarian) who was also teaching there, were sexually abusing some of my classmates.
Or he’ll get his GED, and get into college either based on that or as a non-traditional student, and do just fine even if it’s not his original “dream” college; or he’ll start up his own company and make a few billion; or he’ll become an entirely happy househusband to a career woman who makes lots of money and is quite happy with the situation; or he’ll become the kind of chimney cleaner who wears a fancy costume, make tons of money cleaning rich peoples’ chimneys, set his own hours, and take half the year as vacation; or he’ll go live in the woods for three years and then come out, get the GED, get official college papers, and become a famous naturalist . . .
See, I can make up stories based on insufficient evidence too!
– People may well have been up to scandalous stuff that I didn’t know about; but the closest thing to a public scandal that I remember, from back in the 1960’s, was that some news outlet sent a reporter to talk to the school about drug use in schools in general; the head and the teachers all said ‘oh no we don’t have any drug use here!’ but the reporter also talked to some of the students; who said otherwise.
I think we had an assembly on the subject; but IIRC the sense of the assembly wasn’t ‘whoops, maybe we’ve got illegal drugs in the school after all’ but ‘how dare students say things like that to reporters!’
One of my high school’s art classes did a final project where they painted life-size, full-body self-portraits on vertically mounted wooden boards, which were then displayed in the school’s lobby. A student showed up one morning to discover a swastika carved into the middle of her self-portrait’s chest.
More of a tragedy, but the father of some students killed his wife and all but one of the children before shooting himself. The one who survived did so by hiding in a closet and recorded the entire thing including the kids begging for their lives.
Lol. This reminds me of that poster from a few years back who was convinced that because her son smoked a joint he was 100% going to fail school, become addicted to heroin and live on the streets.
Sadly one of the biggest scandals at my school was when one of the girls brought another girl to the senior prom as her date. It was even in the news.
Another scandal was when a popular girl died in a drag-racing accident. It occurred at a spot that had experienced multiple similar accidents so there was a lot of finger-pointing.
Gym teacher was caught boinking female students. It started before I started high school, he was caught a couple years after I graduated. It made the front page of the local newspaper and got a few mentions on the TV news. He was charged with rape of 11 students. He served 14 years of the 20 year sentence. I found him on a list of sexual predators about 10 years ago, he not on the list now.