“The Adventures of Motorcycle Man and Dragon Girl”
I like it!
My freshman year our homecoming queen was Miss X. Miss X’s mother had been homecoming queen years before her, and Miss X’s grandmother had been the school’s first homecoming queen. About 6 weeks after being so honored, Miss X has to leave school because she’s become pregnant with the gymnastic coach’s child. Quite the scandal.
I would have liked to have gone to high school in Anchorage, Alaska in 1980. The Grateful Dead played two or three concerts in the school auditorium in June of that year.
ah, woodkirk, my old high school of death.
the head of geography was found to be a pederast and convicted. he’s serving 10 years in prison. one of his old students (female) had a breakdown and confessed publicly he was fiddling with her years before. more and more girls came forward, and when they investigated him, they found out just about everything about him was a lie. he wasnt a doctor (of geography), in fact he had no qualifications of any kind, he wasnt half italian as he took pride in telling everyone, and had no family of any sort and lived on his own, even after telling all he was happily maried with 2 kids. he’d been at my school 20 years.
two of the kids in my 6th form year died in an avalanche/snowstorm up in Glencoe, Scotland. they didnt find them for a month until the weather cleared. that was a fun time in the common room.
while we were doing GCSEs, my best mates dad stabbed his mum to death.
as well as the incredibly high mortality rate for people from my year. after above incidents, suicides, drug overdoses and car crashes i think theres round about 20 people, out of 110 or so.
no wonder i moved 200 miles down the road
That was common in my HS too.
Before I started there (when I was like in 7th grade or something) there was a kid who slipped off the second floor stair landing near the cafeteria (slipped in a puddle of Coke is wh at I heard), fell onto the floor and broke both his legs, with the bones sticking out during a lunch period.
There was also the time somebody released a dog into the inner courtyard (accessible only from inside the school) and we had to call the SPCA to come get it.
Senior year, somebody dumped a mother cat and some kittens into the dumpster behind the school. One of the kittens managed to crawl out and followed me and a friend into the school mewing piteously. My friend and I got permission from our first period teacher to skip class so we could call the SPCA. We called the SPCA and decided to get the poor kitty some food while we were waiting. The lunch lady generously donated a carton of milk and some random guy we met in the hallway literally gave us the shirt (well it was a sweartshirt) off his back to keep the poor thing warm while we waited outside for the van to show up and pick it up.
Senior year a guy in the band was arrested during school because he supposedly raped a girl I knew who lived like 2 blocks from me. I wanted to believe she was raped, but then again, knowing her and her slutty, c’mon teasing tactics, I tend to think she went a little too far in teasing him and got into a situation she couldn’t get out of easily.
CJ
Somebody broke into the school one weekend, and egged the place.
All over the main hallways, walls, trophy cases, windows, yuck!
What did we have for lunch that afternoon?
Egg Salad.
Eeew…egg salad is so gross.
We were fortunate in that respect in HS, duke. We could choose what was on the menu, pizza or salad. I ate pizza almost every day for 4 straight years.
And they WONDER why American kids are getting so fat. 
CJ
We had someone setting off M-80s inside the school once a week for like a year. One of our science teachers started dating a student. Last I heard, they’re still married after 20 something years. A kid at a nearby rural school was caught having sex with a cow. That made for interesting exchanges whenever our teams competed:
Them-“Let’s beat City! Let’s beat City!”
Us-“Shut up you cow-f*#^ers”
We were neither creative nor mature.
A boy was so desperate to escape a whipping, he ran away, out of the classroom, up the stairs and threw himself through the window. We’re pretty sure he died.
Of course, this did happen four hundred years ago.
More recently, we were doing first-year Physics experiments using weights hung off Newtonmeters, and every time we did it, we had to make sure we were standing over a tray filled with sand. I asked why this was, and found out that some years before, this experiment had been done without the sand trays, and a girl’s Newtonmeter broke. The weights dropped off and went straight through the floor to the Biology labs below. Thankfully, no-one was hit, but I think it counts as a “strange thing.”
God, where to start…
My senior year, there must have been some sort of weird Cosmic Train Convergence or something. Five people died in separate incidents when they were hit by trains. One guy was following the train tracks home after getting baked at a party, got tired, laid down on the tracks and didn’t wake up before a train rolled over him. The other incident involved four girls who apparently had a suicide pact or something – just before the train arrived at the intersection nearest the high school, the girls drove around the gates and parked on the tracks. Smash. It was a pretty freaky incident.
One of our band teachers also got nailed (no pun intended) for sleeping with a 16-year-old girl. During the investigation, it was discovered that he’d lost his last job for sleeping with a 15-year-old girl.
Let’s put it this way - if it had been the Internet, this guy would have been called a troll. He often voiced very anti-American opinions, though I’m not sure at all how heartfelt they were. He could sometimes be a bit of an asshole, really.
I’ve got Jr High stories rather than H.S. stories. The first is that the science club was greatly looking forward to digging up a time capsule planted 25 years ago. They made a big deal out of it. We dug and dug and it never turned up. As near as we can figure, someone dug it up as a joke soon after it was buried. Embarrassing.
The second: One day, one of the P.E. teachers asked someone to volunteer to go up into the gym rafters and knock down all of the volleyballs that had been stuck up there (some boys considered it a pasttime to try to get them stuck by lobbing them up there). A smallish boy was all for it–but the ductwork gave way and he came crashing down. He landed on all fours, muttered “Oh Sh*t” and toppled over. He ended up only having a few broken bones (amazing, because the gym roof was waaaay up there). I don’t what the PE teacher could have been thinking.
TMWTGG, my Sr. Year Band Director had an affair with a student also! They ended up getting married, IIRC. You aren’t from around the Palos Heights, IL area, are ya?
My weirdest incident - a race riot at my first high school. 
One of my friends had to drop out senior year… So that he could marry the teacher he was dating. Seems that there was a policy about teachers being married to students, but no policy about female teachers having male student boyfriends.
I sang at the wedding.
I apparently went to Arson Junior High, as one of the main student pastimes seemed to be setting things on fire (lockers, boys’ bathroom, each other.) That was when they weren’t all stoned–the school reeked of marijuana so much that you could still smell it in July. The drug use continued into High School; once when the security guards were closing in on a pill dealer he sought to escape trouble by swallowing his entire stash. This move merely earned him a trip to the hospital.
Of course there were the cases where class size was reduced because students attempted to fly their cars Dukes of Hazzard style down winding country roads and wound up wrapping the cars around trees. And there was the student who was shot by her mother (who then shot herself.)
Recently a graduate of my High School (she graduated 15-20 years ago) has accused one of the Junior High guidance counselors of sexually molesting her when she was a student and claimed that the Junior High and High school principals as well as the school superintendent knew about this and covered it up. My mother said she’s suing over it.
In my sophmore year, we were getting stomped in a football game. Finally one of our guys injured a player on the other team bad enough for an ambulance, so we stood in the huddle, just waiting.
The fullback gets out a joint and just fires it up, right there on the field. A few of us snuck a toke before he got scared and put it out.
We were all dope fiends back then, but that was the ballsiest move I’d ever seen.
We lost. This was '77. Ah, the '70’s!
Some kids from the grade ahead of mine went wild on graduation day. They took oil barrels from the shop wing, dumped 'em in the parking lot and took turns spinning donuts. They also graffitied the building and blew up a toilet with an M80.
A couple years later there was an incident with a greased pig.
Another 70’s kid here, although I started Bronx Science in ‘78. No drugs, since I’d grown up in the Bronx during the 70’s and drugs (and graffiti and arson) were so visibly destructive there that it was something most of us steered clear of. We were mostly serious kids, lots of immigrants and black and Latino and Asian and Jewish and outer-borough kids, with the occasional preppie and rich Manhattanite, who wanted to go to good colleges to escape the messy (yet somehow more innocent) NYC of the 70’s. It’s not a building built for looks, but at least we could see and hear the trains of the 205th St. yard all freakin’ day.
Which didn’t mean we didn’t have our stoners, and I would smell pot in the halls about once or twice a month. There was a section of the concrete yard where they hung out (no parking lots, of course, but that was OK because who could possibly afford a car?) and if you left them alone, they left you alone–no gangs at school, even though security was a joke. We had fun, though, different as it may have been from the ‘typical’ American HS, with no cars, no football, no prom, no playing fields, no place to hang out that didn’t mean getting on the El to Manhattan, forty kids in a typical homeroom, etc. Ah, the budget crisis. But we did pretty well, with four people going to Harvard and two to Wellesley (ahem) in my homeroom alone.
Anyway, two things stand out for me: the Roach Coach and the Great Fiddler Crab Scuttle of '80.
The Roach Coach was a truck named “Mr. Chow’s”, painted yellow with fakey Chinese-style writing all over it, but that was OK because the owner was really a guy named Mr. Chow, who would pull up the van on Paul Street and silently sold soda, burgers, franks, etc. But his big hit were the fries. Remember that episode where Homer’s trying to get REALLY fat and Bart rubs a hamburger on a wall to see if it’s greasy enough, and the wall turns transparent? These were the fries that went with that. But Mr. Chow, would call us over with a jaunty calliope-like tune that he liked and would play from the truck as he pulled up. I don’t think he knew it was called “La Cucaracha”.
The Great Fiddler Crab Scuttle was the 1980 Halloween prank; it’s amazing what sort of live critters you can buy in bulk in New York (in fact I pass the “FRESH-KILLED CHICKENS! POLLOS VIVO!” store on the El every morning) so some seniors brought in about 250 tiny baby fiddler crabs and set them loose between classes in three locations in the halls. You know, they can run really fast, and get into niches. And under lockers. And hey, they can go under classroom doors! EEK EEK GAAAH! We found the poor little things all over the place for weeks! Most of them died pretty quickly, but for the next day or so you’d never know where you’d find one, waving its one big claw at you and looking as scared as something with eyes on stalks can look.
There was the car crash where 4 drunken football players learned that in a highspeed game of chicken the tree always wins.
There was the VW bug which was assembled on the roof over night one night.
There was the male health teacher (who all the girls had crushes on) who left to become a woman.
There was the music teacher who had posed for Playboy in her younger days.
There was the time that a ‘For Sale’ sign was put in front of the school.
There was the time that crazy glue was shot into a classroom door’s lock cylander (the period before a test too. Imagine.).
There was the time a copy of the Chemistry final exam was stolen from the Chem teacher’s briefcase MI style…and then xerox’d for distribution.
There was a certain language teacher who attempted to hide the fact he was bald with a gray toupe. If he’d washed it & kept it from turning greenish, it might have worked.
And many years after I left, there was a criminal investigation that made the national news where a mentally handicapped girl was talked into having sex with 4 members of the football team. Ally Sheedy played the cop in the Made For TV Movie.
Two years after I graduated, two boys in my sister’s class (10th graders) hacked into several government computers (FBI, CIA, I forget what all). They were caught, of course, and it made national news. My sister was interviewed in the Washington Post.
I knew these kids since they were 7 years old. It was kind of strange to think of them doing something that would garner national attention. As far as I know, they didn’t DO anything once they got in; they just wanted to prove that they could (and they did). They weren’t allowed to use any computers unsupervised until they turned 18.
I bet they got offered jobs after that. I don’t know what happened to either of them.
Probably the strangest thing that happened when I was a student there was a freshman kid getting duct taped to a pole, upside-down, during break. No teachers saw, so he stayed there until lunch. I didn’t see it, but he rode my bus so he told us all about it on the way home. He had adhesive marks from the duct tape.
In fifth grade, one of my ten-year old classmates hanged herself with a jumprope. Long Island’s youngest suicide.
In tenth grade, a biology teacher/wrestling coach was murdered on his own front lawn by a male prostitute he had brought home.