The class president of 1977 – between graduation and the 5 year reunion – stole all the funds for the reunion, converted them into drugs and had himself a high time. No reunion.
We had a young female teacher that was sleeping with one of her students. It was not really a secret, but no one seemed to care.
We had a youngish male teacher that was rumored to be sleeping iwth one of his students. It was considered much more scandalous, and we weren’t entirely sure it was true.
Also, 5 people from my senior class died in 3 separate DUI accidents.
On the plus side, we had two gay male teachers and no one cared (despite the usual amount of anti-gay stupid shit teenagers said in those days. We had zero openly gay students. This was the 1970s).
[I don’t know when it ended, but for some time public school teachers could be fired for being gay. My father testified in court on behalf of one such teacher who was trying to get his job back. In response to a question about whether a gay teacher would cause children to turn gay, my father replied, “My first grade teacher was a little old lady, I never thought I’d grow up to be one.”]
Not if you’re French:
Also, we had a pair of teachers marry. I knew them – they were teachers there for all four years I was there – and they married a year or two after I graduated. While I was in that school, before they were married, their relationship wasn’t a secret and wasn’t considered scandalous.
One of my HS teachers was treasurer of the teacher’s association (there were no unions in those days) and turned out to have stolen the money. He jumped off a bridge. What a way to go.
snip
Does that mean the stereotype isn’t true? I’ve been led to believe a small town football star wouldn’t have to worry about an arrest. At worst a slap on the wrist, more likely just a warning. Has this big-city elitist been lied to?
About 15 years ago at the private school my son attended, there was a band director and and english teacher, both in the middle school, both married to other people, that started an affair. Many of the students knew about it, as well as members of the faculty. It was becoming an interference to the school operations, so they were both told to knock it off or they were going to be dismissed. They at least were keeping it on the down low or had stopped for several months, until…
One evening at a popular restaurant in our town, the two teachers were having dinner separately with their spouses and respective friends. They saw each other and apparently texted each other to meet in the men’s restroom. A high school student that worked at the restaurant, saw them both go into the men’s restroom, and followed them after a few seconds, and used her phone to video them over one of the stalls having sex in the stall. Video lasted about a minute, before the student/employee had to leave. The video was texted to almost all of the students in the high school and middle school!
Both teachers were abruptly fired the following week.
Whoo! Now that’s a scandal!
Early on in my Junior year a senior in the “stoner” crowd died and the school did not respond in any way despite it having a major emotional impact on the members of that clique.
Later on in the same year a beautiful cheerleader in the senior class died and they closed school for 3 days, held assemblies, and made counseling available for all students.
In retrospect I guess it’s possible they were trying to do better the second time around but I have my doubts.
I went to the “bad” high school in my county. It had that reputation because (A) a few incidents of students getting caught with a gun on campus (nobody was ever shot, and this was a full decade before Columbine), and (B) it was far and away the most diverse school in the county; we had at the time a huge majority of all the non-white students in the county, which is also why it had not one but two separate magnet programs to shore up the number of White and Asian kids (which is how I ended up there).
So just the gun thing, which in hindsight, frankly, was primarily just racism.
(Ironically, because of the magnet programs, it was, and remains one of the highest academically ranked high schools in an extremely highly rated system, nationally)
Some man committed suicide in a lot next tour school athletic field. Someone knocked/threw a ball over the fence and some one climbed over to get it and discovered the body. Word spread like wildfire. A student (who was known as a bit of a creep) claimed he climbed the fence and took a body part from the corpse and kept it in a jar. Pretty much everyone believed him.
During the last week of senior year a girl , who was quite popular, brought in a cream pie and tossed in the face of a teacher who was a prankster himself to his students. The so-called fun loving teacher got the girl banned from the graduation ceremony.
I suppose friends and I caused a bit of a scandal the time we were caught off campus smoking weed. Cops paraded us, handcuffed, through the quad and to the principal’s office. I was instantly expelled and when I went to another high school in my city, many kids there already heard about it.
More of a tragedy than a scandal was an acquaintance of mine who was a victim of a serial rapist..
Bob had no worry about arrest, but apparently the coach was very strict and very anti drugs/alcohol.
I wasn’t on the football team, but I’d heard lectures given by the coach in “health” class.
When I was in middle school, some guy was coming out of the woods on the edge of the school and exposing himself to girls. It happened a few times. Our police set up a sting in which a woman police officer dressed in civilian clothes walked the perimeter of the school yard, for no apparent reason, to entice the person to attempt it again. Everyone in school knew about the sting. Students and teachers were lined up at the windows to watch this woman walk around the perimeter of the school yard. Of course, it didn’t work.
Nothing worth noting when I was in school but my son was friends with this guy who made headlines for a song he recorded about a teacher.
The, generally well-liked, German teacher ditched his wife for a 16 year old girl who had just dropped out of the school- just legal here, as long as she wasn’t a student at his school. To make it worse, the girl had, until then, been dating his son.
The real scandal is that he didn’t lose his job over it, and the school did a very successful job of hushing it all up- a friend who joined the 6th form a few years later had no idea about it. This would have been in 2000, so it was pretty amazing he kept the job- at a girls’ school, no less.
Tragedy rather than scandal- a few years earlier, the head girl; daughter of one of the teachers, and a really lovely person, killed herself. Apparently she thought she’d messed up all her A levels and failed everyone, plus she’d been dumped. Results came a few weeks later- pretty much straight As. The school tried to pretend it was an accident rather than suicide, but basically everyone knew. It pretty much destroyed her dad, who was a single parent.
From my recollection, just viscous teenage gossip.
One of the girls at our school allegedly had to go to the ER for masturbating with a frozen hotdog.
Almost certainly a total lie.
The drama teacher sexually abused boys in the high school I attended.
Including myself.
I’m really sorry to hear that, Cartooniverse. That is, to put it mildly, all kinds of fucked-up and wrong.
Was the teacher punished for this?
I’m guessing you went to the same high school as my kids. Named after a former Postmaster General?
My HS had an amphitheater, and the backdrop was a frequent spot for graffiti so it looked really messy (this was the early 80s).
One Monday we all showed up to find that a beautiful, multi-colored mural had been painted over the boring tan/graffiti-marred back wall, with all sorts of interesting imagery.
Everyone, from the administration to the lowliest freshman, thought it was really cool, and left it alone for months.
Until the administration realized that all those images were LSD-related - window panes in purple pyramids, flying dragons, etc.
It was back to all tan the next day.