I figured I’d start this thread after my high school (soon to be former high school, gotta love transfer and open enrollment) had a bit of a sex scandal. Apparently the band director had sex with a 17-year-old female student. Naturally, the rumors spread faster than the wildfires in California. If the winds in California started blowing at 500 mph, then the rumors spread from this would still beat the wildfires by a magnitude of about 100. Anyway, the director resigned, and now my school is left wondering “What the fuck?” So I decided to see what your stories are.
So, what is the strangest thing that ever happened at your high school?
I’m sure it’s not the strangest thing, but my high school made national news by cheating on some huge test. The teacher made the kids cheat. I have no idea what test, I’d graduated years before, I just know it was a big enough scandal that they made a movie about it, called, appropriately enough, Cheaters. One thing I always thought was kinda cool about that is that they got one of my favorite actors, Paul Sorvino, to play the role of the principal.
Our school superintendant was a pedophile. The school board later admitted to having known about it for years, but this was a small town, and he was an important man, and he’d threaten to sue people who spoke poorly of him, and you know how it is, right?
He wasn’t jailed, dispite having been caught red…handed, and isn’t recorded as a sex offender. His buddy the janitor was convicted of putting pornography in kids’ lockers, and spent some time imprisoned, but the man himself is probably superintending a school somplace right now.
I guess that’s not strange so much as anger-inducing, but I went to a small school so that’s all I have.
One of the science teachers at my high school was the 2nd choice for the teacher in space program when the Challenger accident happened. He was there when it happened.
Sadly, he was not well-liked, either by students or teachers, and the reaction I heard from many people that day was, “Why couldn’t HE have been on the shuttle instead?”
Around my sophomore year they decided to change the boundary line between my school and the next so that more kids would go to the other school. The dumb thing was the new boundary was just blocks away so rather then walking 5 blocks to school they would have to take two buses to get to their school. Naturally we were angry so the students organized a sit in during school.
I think it was the class after lunch everyone left their class and went to sit in front of the Administration building. We had a couple speaches and then the principal came out and told us to go back to class and EVERYONE WENT BACK TO CLASS!!!
I still can’t believe it. Weirdest thing I ever saw at my school. By the way the redistricting went ahead as scheduled and it’s probably still that way today.
I graduated from high school in 1977. My senior yearbook featured an “In Memoriam” page. One of my female classmates had succumbed to a chronic illness; another had been hit by a train while walking along tracks that she apparently believed had been abandoned. A third died of strangulation – whether she committed suicide or simply had a freak accident was never officially determined. A boy had a fatal heart attack on a toboggan run at one of the Metroparks.
Since graduation, we’ve lost a guy who was hit by a car when he stopped to help a stranded motorist on a dark country road. Another male alumnus was fatally struck by an automobile while jogging. A third died of natural causes. Yet another was one of the 37 sailors killed during the 1987 attack on the USS Stark. We even had a despondent man kill his wife and children in a shopping mall parking lot before turning the gun on himself. All told, at least nine (I may be forgetting someone) failed to live long enough to attend our 25-year reunion. Even out of a class of 652, that’s an inordinate number.
My biology teacher claimed to have stapled a boy’s tongue to the roof of his mouth to stop him from swallowing it during an epileptic seizure. If it’s true, then this may be the strangest thing that happened at my high school. If not, then it’s something else.
A story spread through school claiming that the local chapter of Satan worshippers (Local #267) were fixin’ to sacrifice a virgin after a particular basketball game. I don’t know why they wanted to wait till afterwards – it seemed to me our basketball team could have used all the help they could get. So for the week or two leading up to the Big Game, there was no small amount of fear gripping the school. I remember being in PE class and seeing this girl suddenly fall to the floor screaming and sobbing – apparently her friend had just told her that rumor had it she was one of the potential candidates. (Yeah, her and Madonna.)
Anyway, the night of the Big Game came. I rarely went to basketball games but I went to this one because I wanted to see what would happen. Would the power go out sometime during the halftime show and the Dark Lord’s Izod-wearing minions enter and drag away one of the pom-pon girls? Turns out the biggest excitement occurred towards the end of the 4th quarter, when the kid sitting next to me turned to me and said with a voice of utter foreboding, “I don’t like the look of this, Osbie. The crucifix that I made has fallen apart.” I looked and sure enough, the two mini railroad spikes that he had lashed together with some leather strips and hung around his neck had fallen apart. Surely this indicated that stuff was about to go down but no, we all shuffled out of the gym to our cars and rides waiting beyond.
After the game, I went with some friends to a local church because they often offered after-game get-togethers and they had one that night. We ate pizza, drank soda pop, played games and went home to bed.
In the morning, nobody had been sacrificed.
Thus concludes another edition of Anti-Climactic Theatre. Good night.
The mob hit in the parking lot of the American Legion right behind my school.
But since that wasn’t exactly a school thing, the amazing number of color changes can be. Freshman year, each wing was it’s own color: blue, vomit (er, sorry, mint) green, off-white. The wing with the cafeteria could truly only be described as “Radioactive tangerine with a shit-gray racing stripe”. Sophomore year, new principal. Let’s paint all those colorful walls white! And the lockers gray! Yay for institutions! This past summer: lets paint over all the murals (white), and then paint all the lockers, doors, stairwells, some floors, and parts of the cafeteria bright purple! Every so often, even now, we’ll walk in and they’ll have found something else to turn purple. Most recent victim was the inside of a janitorial closet.
Or the time that a sink spontaneously fell off the wall in one of the guy’s bathrooms and sat there for two weeks.
Or the power outage in the middle of one of the theater productions.
Or last year’s graduation, in which they booed the distric superintendant and school principal off the stage for no apparent reason.
The mob hit in the parking lot of the American Legion right behind my school.
But since that wasn’t exactly a school thing, the amazing number of color changes can be. Freshman year, each wing was it’s own color: blue, vomit (er, sorry, mint) green, off-white. The wing with the cafeteria could truly only be described as “Radioactive tangerine with a shit-gray racing stripe”. Sophomore year, new principal. Let’s paint all those colorful walls white! And the lockers gray! Yay for institutions! This past summer: lets paint over all the murals (white), and then paint all the lockers, doors, stairwells, some floors, and parts of the cafeteria bright purple! Every so often, even now, we’ll walk in and they’ll have found something else to turn purple. Most recent victim was the inside of a janitorial closet.
Or the time that a sink spontaneously fell off the wall in one of the guy’s bathrooms and sat there for two weeks.
Or the power outage in the middle of one of the theater productions.
Or last year’s graduation, in which they booed the distric superintendant and school principal off the stage for no apparent reason.
