I went to 3 different high schools. The first one, in the little town I grew up in. A boy that was a year ahead of me was hit by a car and killed in front of the school. It was after school during band practice, so most of us didn’t find out until the next day. The driver lived on my street, he wasn’t charged because the boy had ran in front of his truck, but he aged about 20 years within a week.
The second school was a private boarding school I attended for 1 year. It was small and had funding problems. Most of the kids were middle classed americans whose parents wanted rid of them for awhile. There were a few wealthy non- american kids that weren’t accepted at other schools for behaviour problem, and there was this one guy that was uber, ultra, mega rich from Iran. He was there because he had been kicked out of almost every other american private school. Since it was his fathers money that was pretty much keeping the school open, this guy could get away with murder. He was suspected of raping several students and atleast one teacher, he was found with drugs and hookers in his room, it was unbelievable.
The third school was an inner city school in Nashville. One day some guy just walked in off the street and shot a student. I think it was gang related.
There was a guy at my high school named Mark Branch. He was obsessed with horror movies. He ended up murdering a girl in true slasher fashion, after which he disappeared. The whole county went nuts. I think this was right around Halloween, too, because I remember they made the kids go trick-or-treating in the daylight that year. Branch was eventually found in the woods in a nearby hill town. He had committed suicide (I think he hung himself). Some relative of my then-girlfriend found him.
The only reference I can find to this incident on the web is on this page:
Gee, after all of this my high school years seem sooooooo boring. Pretty old fashioned parochial school. Nobody murdered. No suicides. No pregnancies – well, none of our guys got pregnant (a few girlfriends though). No teacher-student hanky-panky. No drugs that I ever saw (alcohol and tobacco excepted).
Buuuuut.
There was the time my sophomore year that we were taking some idiotic standardized test. Our homeroom teacher was a rather attractive woman, but everyone hated her with a passion.
So there we were, taking our tests, and Ms. X sat behind her desk at the front of the class reading a small paperback – with a book cover. One of the more unusual regulations there at my school was that every text book had to have a book cover, by which I mean a large sheet of paper properly folded and taped over the book’s jacket. But this rule only extended to hard-cover books. A paperback with a cover was definitely suspicious. During a break, one of the students asked, “what are you reading, Ms. X?” She snapped at him, “none of your business.” Big mistake. During the next testing session, Ms. X took a restroom break, but left the book in her desk. Dying of curiosity, one of the guys opened the drawer, took out the book, and peeked inside. He then proudly held it up to display the title page for our collective enjoyment: 101 More Female Sexual Fantasies. Naturally, he put the book back where he had found it. But without the cover. The look on Ms. X’s face when she opened the drawer was priceless.
Then there was the time when the humanities teacher put on a video for us to watch and stepped out of the room. One of the kids (somewhat predictably) substituted a porno tape. When Mr. Y returned, he turned it off and then criticized the prankster’s choice in film entertainment. “It has no plot, no character, no themes” he said. One brave soul declared, “but it has a great climax.”
After my junior year ended in June a guy in my year was driving his father’s brand new convertible home on a twisty, hilly,wooded road. The next morning the police found the car at the bottom of a hill completely totaled with no driver. The tracked the car to this kids father but the kid was nowhere to be found. The cops and the kids parents thought that he was hiding or had run away because he had wrecked his dad’s car. The summer passed and the kid still had not turned up or contacted anyone.
The following November some kids playing in the woods near the accident just happened to look up into the now bare trees found what was left of the missing kid. The police found almost all the rest of him under the leaves at the base of the tree.
It seems when he went off the road the car hit a tree first and the kid was thrown from the car and landed up in a tree a good 30 yards from where the car was found. The thick leaves in the tree hide his body from the first cops to find the car and as he decayed and the summer wore on, bits and pieces of him fell off or were dragged away by animals.
We had two teachers named Mr. Johnson who impregnated students in the same year.
We had another teacher whose defense to an accusation of impregnating a female student he spent a LOT of time with was parthenogenesis. Yes, she was supposedly a virgin. Since the teacher was an advanced biology teacher, and was extremely effeminate, most people bought it.
About every other week someone would take a shit in a trash can and light it, filling the upper floor with noxious smoke.
The strangest thing happened in my freshman year. A strange loner-type who was rumored to be a Satan worshipper saw one of the preppy kids who taunted him constantly alone one night, so he pulled him into his van and stabbed him to death - then realized he killed the wrong guy. He was buried in a shallow grave near the fairgrounds, and was discovered soon after.
I later met the guy he intended to kill. He deserved it.
sounds like what happened when i was a junior…
before football games, we (the band) would have practice. Practice started about 30 minutes after school let out, so we all would rush down to the band room, shove our books in our lockers and drive/hitch rides with other kids/walk to the strip mall across the street to get dinner. Problem: the road we had to cross is a major road through town - but, there is no traffic light. Thus, those of us who were unlucky enough to have to walk had to time it just right. Usually, if you waited and you were smart, you could safely cross.
Well, the day before our band went to compete at championships, our timpani player is walking across the street and gets slammed by a car going 50 mph. (first of all, he was wearing his walkman and NOT paying attention. secondly, according to aquaintances of his, he was notorious for darting through traffic to cross that street…I’m not saying he deserved it but it was bound to happen sooner or later)
we found out about it either because we saw the accident as we were driving back into school or it was relayed to us by said drivers. what didnt help was that two of our assistant principals (who obviously think that the band is low on the totem pole of school activities) were starting to get on OUR cases “you children shouldnt be crossing that road, why are you even here? youre unsupervised!!” this is the way its been done for years, lady, back off.
so our staff held a little meeting with the band to discuss “do we go to the football game and play?” and we got into a debate over whether it was disrespectful or not or whether the kids even felt like playing after one of our own just got smashed by a car and had to be medivac-ed… in the end, we went to the football game, played a stand-still show and left.
after he recovered, we all tried to make him feel better by being friendlier to him (as he was one of the more annoying kids in our class)…he then proceeded to practically stalk me, as well as a few others (stalk as much as he could - he couldnt drive. so he just called and IMed me a lot)
my mom finally got the hint when he started conversations with HER on the phone and started lying for me, saying i was “working” when i was really sitting on the couch.
the only other strange thing i can think of that happened - and i knew about it - was after a blizzard hit our town last year. we had off from school for a few days. some kids went over to the school and, on the front lawn, proceeded to sculpt a giant…
toilet.
yeah, i dunno either.
Man, good stuff here. Mine are pretty tame.
Our bio teacher got caught boinking a student. By the principal. In the classroom.
Our chem teacher burned a kid’s hand. She was heating some chemical and told him to put his hand over it, it wouldn’t hurt. Well, it did. She taught for three more years.
A girl was caught servicing guys out behind the weightroom. They’d go out, get a BJ, and come back in. Took the teachers a while to catch on. Her boyfriend was kinda upset, as you can imagine.
Our elevator would regularly get stuck. And if you pushed the buttons just right, you could make it get stuck. And if you and your girlfriend timed bathroom breaks right…you get the idea. I never partook, but I knew some people who did.
I wasn’t there to see it, but I’m told the class valedictorian from a 3 or four years ahead of me pretty much had the whole number one in his class thing in the bag; unless he just stopped showing up to school he’d be pretty sure to get the spot. So one day, towards the end of his senior year, he brings a hooker to school. A real hooker, I’m told. Just to walk around and go to class with him I guess. They took his valedictorian thing away from him.
Let’s see…
As far as sex, my sr year a teacher had the misfortunte of walking in on a couple in the bathroom, I believe they were suspended for a while.
And the prank:
It’s something of a tradition for the senior class to play some prank on the school near the end of the school year in my hometown, so my sophomore year some guys poured quick-set concrete mix into some toilets. Long story short: we were kept out of the bottom floor for a day while they cleaned up the putrid mess.
Also, while I was in HS, a new tech ed teacher porked a girl (8th or 9th grade) on one of the tables in the tech ed rooms. My serious joke about that was that they probably didn’t even wash the table. The teacher was fired, of course.
And when I graduated, they canceled the last day of school because some disgruntled teacher dug up the tiles in his/her/its room and caused something of an asbestos scare.
In Nashville they used to have a thing called “forced busing” in the persuit of desegregation. Basically, kids in certain school districts would spendan hour riding a bis to the inner city schools if the lived in the Suburbs or vice versa. It was pretty wildly unpopular with everyone, so they decided to start phasing it out right about the time my family moved there… but I still got to experience it.
Anyway, right about the time they stopped importing the innercity kids to my upper-middle class suburban highschool, they redrew the districting lines to include the nearby neighborhood (they had previously been districted for a school further away in a similar neighborhood, but exempt from the busing) and got a several million dollar renovation grant.
Basicallly, I got to watch the entire school change in the course of five years. The attitudes of the students changed. The way the administration behaved changed. They started shuffling around the teachers. The building itself got bunches of computers, fibre networking, a new library and theater, a bunch of security cameras and what-not.
It went from a very laid back, people hanging out in the halls, no dress code (we wouldn’t have obeyed it), people eating lunch where ever they wanted, fights, kids making out in the halls, lots of smoking, etc… to… I dunno… cattle or sheep. I found it all kind of depressing and strange that the population could change that much.
As for specific memorable incidents…
A wrestling meet. The stands are resonably full, but most people are just there for the social aspect, chatting with their friends, not really paying attention to the kids toiling away homoerotically on the mats below. Then some guy gets kinda flipped on his back and someone yells “HE’S GOT A BONER!” and the room erupts into chaos.
The school had two flagpoles (on account of the rennovation, one at the former and one at the new entrance) and one year someone came back from Youth Camp all fired up to do the Stealth Christianity, revisionist history thing, and started putting up the “See You At The Pole” prayer group posters. I decided to make some posters of my own inviting folks to pay hommage to their Lord Satan (bring your own goat) at the large phallic patriotic stick. I specified the other flagpole from the Xian group. I never got the full details since I wasn’t there that morning, but there was apparently a small Holy War before school about a week later.
Hrmm… had an art teacher almost burn down the building by catching a paraffin bath on fire… had a biology teacher get fired for having his senior class brew beer as a project… then there was the time the chemistry teacher found a big ol’ jug of picric acid in the back of the supply closet. Curiously, they didn’t evacuate anyone, just quietly came, stuck it in a bucket of water, stuck the bucket in a ballistic thingamagig and walked out with it. Then there was the incident when someone posed the question of whether a bunch of students and teachers playing with the helium balloons at some school club function constituted a violation of the new Zero Tolerance drug policy (re: inhalant use).
That’s about all I remember, besides the usual tame bits about people being caught in this or that sexual act. Oh, and I got a free cat one day. Just showed up, metal shop kids were throwing rocks at it, my biology teacher at the time rescued it and had it in the classroom. Rather than continuing to hide in a box at the far end of the lab room as it had been doing all day, it decided to sit on the desk in front of mine and stare at me… and then go to sleep in my lap. I got some interesting looks at the end of the day walking out of the building with a cat on my arm.
Let’s see… When I was in grade 8, the small gym was set on fire - by the son of one of the teachers.
On the last day of school in grade 10 or 11, my last class of the day was let out after about only 5 minutes (nothing unusual there), so I was wandering around the nearly deserted halls with a few friends, waiting for a couple other people to be let out of their classes. As we rounded a corner, we heard a very loud crashing noise come from behind us, went back to see that a block of lockers had spontaneously fallen over.
One teacher who was supposed to be chaperoning a school dance showed up absolutely hammered and started hitting on every girl he saw before the other chaperones managed to remove him. At the same dance (it was Halloween), one of my friends who had decided to dress in drag had a different, sober teacher tell him that his legs were quite attractive and maybe he should think about modeling, as well as having a male student who appeared to genuinely believe he was a girl ask for his phone number.
And of course there were assorted incidents of teachers sleeping with each other, teachers sleeping with students and so on, but I’m not sure that really counts as strange since it seems to happen everywhere.
A few things:
Around my freshmen year the senior class went to La Ronde in Canada for their Senior skip day. Alas, some of the less intelligent members of the school got royally trashed because the legal drinking age is 18. No more Canada trips.
One year for school spirit every grade made a giant snow sculpture of their choice. The seniors made a 10 foot tall Sonic the Hedgehog, which was located in the center of a roundabout where our granite sign is. May not sound strange, but THIS Sonic was giving everyone the finger as they went up the hill. I never got to see it, the finger in question was removed from Sonic.
We had one science teacher named Mr Briggs who was pretty eccentric but ok, and the one thing you NEVER EVER did in his class was say, “You wouldn’t dare.” If you said it, he did it. I saw him mix a few drops of detergent in a students hair, I guess someone before my time got a gallon of water dumped on him, and someone said he wouldn’t dare to take all of that really volatile stuff they keep in kerosine, leave it outside, and let it explode. I guess it left a pretty impressive crater, but that was after my time.
My own tale of strange woe: I SUCK at chemistry. Really really bad. The mole conversions threw me for a loop every single time, and I wasn’t the only one with problems. Anyway the teacher is explaining it yet again to the whole class, and then suddenly it kicked in. I knew exactly what he was talking about, how to do the conversion, it seemed so incredibly simple I couldn’t imagine how I had missed it for so long…
Then after 3 seconds I lost it. I was quite loud in my distress, I was pretty much going at the top of my lungs laughing and going, “NO FUCKING WAY MAN, I HAD IT!”
One time during cross country practice I got an extreme adrenaline rush and, like the moment of chemistry, a time of short, but complete, glory. Basically I went from my normal running speed to my sprinting speed for about thirty seconds without trying. People thought I was on crack to be running so fast until I explained it was a freak thing and not on purpose.
Someone I went to school with a few years after we all had graduated was arrested for murdering someone and a Bread and Pupper Festival.
Finally on a sadder note, one of my classmates, Darcie Mandago was diagnosed with cancer of the lymphnodes our junior year and we all thought she’d be fine going through chemo and stuff and then they found a second cancer travelling up her spine. Even if they had found it at the earliest stages there was nothing they could do. She went to the prom in a red dress and died the day before the commencement exercises. They played Lady in Red at her funeral. It pretty much destroyed my personal teenage feeling of invulnerability, I can tell you that.
Sanscour
They filmed a Brooke Shields movie at my high school. At first we were all excited, but then she was mean to the kindergardeners (it was a private school - you could start in nursery school at age three and go through high school all in the same buildings). No one is mean to kindergarderners, especially snotty movie stars, so we all decided to hate her.
The movie: Endless Love. I’m in it, as are many of my friends. That is the only reason to watch it.
They filmed a Brooke Shields movie at my high school. At first we were all excited, but then she was mean to the kindergardeners (it was a private school - you could start in nursery school at age three and go through high school all in the same buildings). No one is mean to kindergarderners, especially snotty movie stars, so we all decided to hate her.
The movie: Endless Love. I’m in it, as are many of my friends. That is the only reason to watch it.
Really! How was she “mean”? Just curious.
At my high school, during prize-giving one year, one of the students in my class sprinted up the aisle and did his best to hit the headmaster in the face with a custard pie.
But he tripped at the last moment, and only managed to get a little smear on the headmaster’s lapel. I was glad; the headmaster was a pretty decent sort, and this guy had been a total asshole for as long as I’d known him.
Not quite as exciting as the others, but at least different:
When I was at secondary school, in 1989, the air raid siren went off. Yes, this is a Second World War air raid siren, it had never been disconnected. It was said that it had short circuited. It scared the living daylights out of the poor elderly residents who lived nearby.
When I was a freshman The Who played a concert downtown and a number of students from my HS went - and three of them didn’t come back. They died in a crowd stampede caused by poor planning and “festival seating”. That next day our whole school was silent. I can still remember being able to hear everyone’s footsteps in the hallway, since there was no chatter; I’d never realized how much noise our walking created. In those days it was easy to send the news crews away, so we were pretty much left alone to grieve.
Our soccer coach used to get stoned with members of his team.
The head of our drama department was exceedingly neurotic and maladjusted. He held an awards night in our big auditorium to honor students who’d participated in various productions, and featured slides he’d taken over the year, displayed on a huge screen. I remember noticing how uncomfortable some of the parents were as he rambled on and on in his tributes to his students. But the one that really set the parents on edge was the shot of a female student’s ass in a pink leotard.
I created a scandal (yes! me!) by dating a Black student when I was a sophomore. This was many, many years ago when such things simply weren’t done. But he was cute as a bug. So the next year, when I tried out to be a soccer “Ball Girl” again, I was rejected. This despite the fact that I’d worked my ass off serving as Ball Girl for not only the Boys’ team, but the Girls’ team as well (which I did of my own volition; no one had thought of doing it before, but I thought they deserved some support). However, fate intervened. Boyfriend and I broke up at the start of my Junior year and he went on to date another White girl - who was also a Ball Girl. So she sat in the stands with him in her Ball Girl sweater.
When I was in the seventh grade (yeah, not high school) I started a rumor that there was a Nostradamas (sp) prophecy that said that if two Popes died within 6 weeks of each other, the world would end by noon, Friday.
The rumor spread like wildfire and, sure enough, that Friday during our 11:45-12:30 lunch break the lunchroom got totally silent at 11:59am. There were a few clueless individuals who were asking “what’s going on?”, but even the teachers seemed to be clock-watching.
A few seconds after twelve some people started talking, which pretty much broke up the mood. The overly loud buzz of a lunchroom full of kids feeling relieved started, and that was that.
FWIW, I was never pegged as the starter of the rumor, though my friends knew. It just spread so damned quickly that I was constantly having people tell me about it.
Oddly enough, it was one of the more educational moments of my life.
When it came time for student body officer elections, we had the gold and the blue parties (school colors). A group of us juniors started the red party. This was 1974, but you’d have thought it was the 50’s – people absolutely freaked!
The blue and gold parties were mainly the popular kids. Turned out there was a huge group of disaffected who were happy for an alternative. So you suddenly had all the potheads, slackers, geeks, crazies, etc. united under one party.
Polls showed we had over 50% of the vote for most of the offices. The blues and golds went to administration with all kinds of legal tactics to try and shut us down – no go. If it wasn’t for a last minute push by the extremely popular (and admittedly nice) blue president candidate, we would have swept the election. We ended up with VP, Treasurer, and Secretary – all juniors. Sadly, that was the last year of the party. I forget why. BTW, our red party presidential candidate is now a teacher at the same school.