What's the strangest thing that ever happened at your high school?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

Well, I can’t contend with murders, but I was in the midst of 2 incidents that resulted in a full blown brawl.

Sophmore year, varsity basketball game. We were playing at an all boys school. They were ranked #2, we were ranked #1 in the state. It so happened that a few players from each team knew each other from travling summer ball. None us liked anyone from the other team. The two schools pretty much despised each other. During the middle of the game, I am merrily running down the court in the midst of play. All of a sudden, I hear the familiar “We’ve got spirit, yes we do, we’ve got spirit, how bout you” chant from the all boys school. Our fans responded with “We’ve got girls, yes we do, we’ve got girls, how bout you”. Perfectly timed, totally clear, and completely shut up and angered the other fans.

Their retaliation. Post game, a bunch of them managed to overturn one of the school buses we were to ride home in. So, we had to wait 20 minutes in the locker room for a replacement, at which point we received a police escort home.

Fast forward 3 months. Now, the same two teams are playing at our high school. The fued is now at a boiling point. During the game one of their players essentially tackles one of our players going up for a lay-up. Apparently that was all the crowd needed because both sides then streamed onto the court to fight. The odd thing was, not one person laid a hand upon me even though I was one of the players on the court when it happened.

After clearing the gym, we finished the game with no one watching. As a bonus, my team won both games.

62

Our school removed lunch from the timetable and cut lessons down by about 5 mins each. Result = we all got out two hours earlier than any other school. No reason really. Still cool.

63

Oh yeah, we had the teacher-student scandals, the strange things appearing in the hallways, the rampant drug use. But none of those stick out in my mind quite like this incident:

All freshmen were required to take a Wellness course, and my freshman year, I got the enthusiastic new coach. He decided to take us all to a Health Fair at the local university and let us run loose. A couple of guys got together - one of which was an intelligent, free-spirited friend of mine (Ben), another of which was a third-time freshman waiting to turn 18 so he could drop out - and decided to phone a bomb threat in to the school. It was loser-guy’s idea, but it was Ben who made the call, IIRC. When we came back from the field trip, the entire school was outside and there were LOTS of police cars and “special” police cars out front, complete with bomb-sniffing dogs. None of us knew what was going on…except for a couple of guys in the back of the bus, sniggering. I don’t know the details of it, if they confessed or what, but loser-guy got sent away and presumably served some time.

However, the officials knew that Ben was smart, and generally a good guy, who just made a really, really stupid choice. So instead of having him serve time, they carried out a different punishment: Anytime he was at school or a school event, he had to wear a bright orange hunter’s vest, with black block letters that read, “DON’T TRUST ME, I MAKE BOMB THREATS” - for an entire calendar year.

We got some funny looks from museum employees on field trips. It was great.

64

A girl got expelled from my H.S. for setting up shop in the boys’ bathroom and having sex with 2 guys at a time. The 2 guys caught in the act got expelled, too. The 5 guys in line waiting for their turn just got suspended for a few days.

65

Our football team had kind of a mascot…a retarded man known as Walking Tom. He hung around the team practices, got their water and did other little errands for the coaches, and always ran out with the team when they hit the field at the games. He’d wear this ratty varsity jacket all the time. He kept it buttoned up, but never tucked in his shirt tails.

One game during halftime, Walking Tom came out and started crawling all over the field. The marching band had to step around him during their show. Finally, security pulled him off. It turned out one of the football players had lost a contact lens and Walking Tom went looking for it.

Chalk up another band director getting nookie. Only it wasn’t from one of his students, but two. One was the drum major. The other one was a past drum major who graduated the year before but still hung around. The three of them were caught in a hotel together, registered as “Mr. Raines, wife and daughter.”

66

Well, let’s see…

There was the guy from a neighboring school who followed and forced his way onto the soccer team’s bus after a game and threatened to kill a couple of people. Because of that, we couldn’t play them again until everyone had graduated.

There was the alternative school student waiting for her bus who stabbed someone in the neck with a pencil.

There were the two special education students who got caught having oral sex under the back staircase during lunch one day.

And of course, the two friends of mine who had sex in a bathroom after school one day while trying to get that month’s newspaper finished.

67

Oh, I forgot the band director cutting his half of the couch off with a chainsaw when they fired him. He had paid for half of it, and the school wouldn’t buy his half or sell theirs, so he just cut it in half and drove off with his piece.

68

This has jogged two more memories:

The time in eighth grade when a student (8th grade) decided to run away. With her boyfriend. Who was in 6th grade. They were found at 3 AM that night alone in a sleazy by-the-hour motel on a local highway.

The time in eighth grade when they had to call the cops to come and remove a teacher from the premises. Turned out she was not only illegally in the US, but had also forged all her education credentials. Principal told her to leave; she wouldn’t; principal called the cops.

69

Mass hysteria

70

In boarding school in England, my rugby coach, who was also a science teacher, blew up his hand while demonstrating how to make gunpowder.

Rugby practice got interesting after that, let me tell you…

At my high school here in Florida, we had two separate alarm systems- one was a tornado warning, and the other was a fire alarm. The principal demonstrated both of them one morning so we’d know which was which. So a few weeks later, we hear an alarm going off. I recognise it as the tornado warning and jump under my desk… everyone else, including the teacher, runs outside. Of course, they got yelled at by the principal and sent back inside (it was a drill) and I got to make fun of everyone for a week.

Out of the 60 or so classes which were in session at the time, only two teachers correctly identified the alarm and kept their classes inside. Only eight other students from the classes that ran outside correctly identified it, including me.

The teachers started a petition to have the tornado alarm removed the next day :wink:

When I was a senior, a member of the last two US Olympic teams (who will remain nameless) who coached our track teams and taught during the offseasons, was seduced by a member of my graduating class. Virtually every student knew, and we actually joked about it in front of other faculty members. They all wanted to sleep with him too, so he never got in trouble…

71

Someone had a baby and left it in a toilet.

Someone (not a student or teacher, just some random guy) committed suicide in our parking lot.

The curtains caught fire when the “magic jumping beans” in production of Into the Woods hit them.

72

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh! Can’t…stop…the vomiting. So, so gross, Mr. Hahn.

73

Oi! Where do I start?

Well, this is in senior year: There was this CAPP teacher that everyone loathed. It didn’t help her case when CAPP was a much hated and viewed as useless course forced on us by the government. But this teacher, she was rude to her students, whenever a student would ask a question, she’d use a “I-can’t-believe-you-asked-that-question-you’re-so-stupid” tone to answer them. I can honestly say I don’t know one single person in my school that liked her, or even tolerated her. So, in the middle of senior year, someone set off a smoke bomb in her room. Fortunately for her, it was during lunch time and no one was in there. But for a day or two, when you walked past the room, it was smokey orange. For a few months, her CAPP classes were moved to the cooking room where the kids kept playing with the knives.

Another thing during senior year, some kids decided to be badass and vandalize other schools. Spray painting things like how our school rocked, and the other schools sucks. Then, they decided that vandalizing other schools weren’t enough and trashed the gym after it was set up for a Remembrance Day assembly (the lowest of low). They were eventually caught, and according to rumours that flew around school, not only did they have to pay for the damages, but had to do janitorial work as punishment. Oddly enough, the kids that did this were honour students.

In sophmore year, some kids kept pulling the fire alarms. It got the the point were we’d have a false alarm once a week. And getting the fire department to come and check it out cost around $800 and the administration was not happy about that. It eventually ceased, but I don’t think anyone was caught.

And all throughout high school… there’s this one hallway where the ceiling is really low, and if you were taller than 5’, then you can stretch your hands up and touch it. It was also made of the flimsy cardboard type tiles, so every year, the kids would just reach up and smash it. By the middle of the year, the tiles would be in pieces on the floor. And every year, they’d replace them, only to have the cycle start again.

And what school would be complete without a teacher-student scandal. It happened WAAAAAY before I started high school, but it’s about the photography teacher, who was sorta creepy to start with. His wife was a former student. But then again, it happened when he started teacher, so I’m guessing he was around 20ish, and she was a senior, and 18. They waited until she graduated before they got married, and even though this was the case, once in a while, you could hear someone in the hallway say "What…? You REALLY think they waited until she graduated to have a relationship? Very mild compared to the other scandals.

This is about all I can remember. I’m just glad I’m not there anymore!

74

Hmmmmm…“Anxiety caused illness at school, study finds.” And the article also goes on to mention “Numerous government investigators studied the school grounds and analyzed blood samples. They examined puddles and grease traps and even checked the air of caves below the school.”

vibrotronica, your high school was so on a Hellmouth. Did students often disappear unexplainedly, or attack someone with super-strength, only to have the police explain it away as “Drugs. She must have been on drugs.”?

75

When I was a freshman, our band director was one of the majorette’s date for the senior prom. They got married two weeks after graduation.

The band director before him was convicted of child molestation shortly after he was fired. The band director after him was fired because her husband was found to be part of a kiddy porn ring.

We’ve had at least one pregnant cheerleader graduate every year for the last six. Oh, and a girl went into labor at the prom once.

After the school proper burned down (lightning strike), we were in trailers connected by wooden boardwalks. Someone tried to burn the boardwalks and trailers via kerosene.

Three tornadoes came through the town one night and blew away half the town and the junior high school.

And right after I graduated, the health teacher left her husband and filed for divorce, and moved in with the head football coach, who had long been rumored to be involved with the (male) guidance counselor. The health teacher and football coach got married as soon as the divorce was finalized.

76

Nothing especially odd happened at my high school when I attended there, but three notable incidents (that I know of) have occurred there, all before my time.

When the stage in the auditorium was first constructed, the plans called for a tunnel running from the orchestra pit under the stage and back into the actors’ dressing room. For some reason or another, during construction, the tunnel wasn’t built, but the stage was still built hollow (i.e. wooden floor over an empty space). A few years later, the drama folks were putting on a performance of Romeo and Juliet, and as part of the stage decoration there were several faux-stone pillars, very heavy, but of some material I don’t remember. During one of the scenes in the play where the actress playing Juliet is lying there playing dead, the vibrations from some of the other actors moving around the stage were enough to cause one of the pillars to fall over, straight onto the actress’ face. Thankfully, she survived, though she was pretty badly messed up. They filled in the interior of the stage with concrete soon after that.

My physics teacher, her first year there, performed a demonstration for the class of putting an exceedingly tiny piece of sodium metal into a beaker of water, so they could see the pretty flame. She dropped the metal in, and nothing happened. Waited a few minutes, still nothing. So she (foolishly, she admits) dumped the beaker into the trashcan. About 10 minutes later, one of the students pipes up, “Ms. B, the trashcan is on fire!” Cleared out half the school for the rest of the day.

The last incident I know the least about. A certain teacher’s ex-husband walked in one day with a shotgun, shot her, and then himself. I never got the full story on that one, but it obviously had a large effect on the school: nobody ever talked about it in anything other than passing mention.

77

When I was in high school in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, our drama department did a production of the musical Gypsy that got a couple of the churches in town all worked up. They thought it was inappropriate that high school students were doing a play about strippers. Nevermind that the play really wasn’t about strippers or stripping, but was more about the effect a domineering stage mother’s actions had on the course of her daughters’ lives. If anything, the play seems to suggest that Gypsy Rose Lee’s becoming a burlesque dancer (not a stripper in the modern sense of the word) is a negative effect of her mother’s controlling ways.

Anyway, the aforementioned fundies boycotted the play and I heard that one or two pastors mentioned the play in an unfavorable light in their sermons, which wouldn’t have been such a bad thing if it weren’t for some of the kids who were in the play also being members of these churches and present at the sermons. We made the local nightly news and several articles and editorials (all favorable) appeared in the Tulsa World.

78

Two stories:

One, we had a copycat mercury spill. This was an epidemic for a time, it happened at several different schools in a month. Apparently, kids figured out that if you take a thermometer from the chemistry labs, break it open, and leak the 3 or 4 drops of mercury inside on the floor, the school gets closed.

At the time, we were sitting in class and they made an announcement for us not to change classes at the bell and to stay put. We all joked that it was a mercury spill. And yet it actually was.

Worst part: they wouldn’t let us go back to our lockers, and it was winter. So we all had to go home without coats, bring a different coat next day, and then bring home 2 the next day.

Another great story (names changed): Mrs. Jones is married to Mr. Jones, who is the superintendant of the school. The funny part is how they got to be married. Mrs. Jones used to be Mrs. Smith. She began hooking up with Mr. Jones while she still was Mrs. Smith, in the darkroom of our yearbook office. Sadly, the darkroom was taken out when we went digital during my time there. But we all joked that we should but up a historical marker to commemorate the site.

79

Hmmm… that would explain a lot.

80

Well…

  • Cute female PE teacher getting pantsed/down-trailed during class. Pants, underwear, the lot. She quit a few weeks later and the offender got suspended.

  • The psychotic Social Studies teacher that would cry at the drop of a hat. Oh, she wouldn’t leave since the principal was going to give her a rotten reference for being incompedent.

  • The old teacher/student relations in my next high school. Incidently I briefly went out with the student’s sister.