My high school had a few unusual traditions around graduation time.

The first related to our director, a man who gave his 100% on official school business and then gave another 100% on all of his hobby projects around the school. It wasn’t that we had something like an apiary or a pond biotope. We had an apiary and a pond biotope and a herd of goats and a tiny vineyard (in an area mostly unsuitable for wine) and a shelter for emotionally disturbed aras. In a public school. And all that besides him being a highly respected director and teacher who epitomized the definition of “strict but fair”.

So at some point the students started to express their gratitude by giving the school presents upon graduation, usually themed around the director. The gym sported a Jurassic Park sign, except with the name of the school and with the profile of the T-Rex replaced with that of the director. In another year someone had contacts with the roads office and got something that looked like an official city limits sign made, except that it identified the school along with “administrative region <director’s name>”. Very cool; he took that one with him when he retired.

Another tradition is somewhat common in the region: The “chaos day”, effectively a formalized graduation prank. At my school, it worked like this: The evening before, the students were given a copy of the keys to the school and free access to the school grounds to prepare. The next day they had to prevent the teachers from entering the building; if a teacher got in, school would resume as per normal. The teachers had a fairly good track record. Many graduating classes failed to account for the fact that the teachers had bolt cutters. One time they didn’t account for an obscure window at the back of the school, which happened to be an emergency exit and had an external lock.

My year didn’t take any chances. I come from a fairly rural area so we had farmers in class and those farmers had forklifts and hay bales. By the time school was supposed to start, all entrances to the building had solid walls of hay in front of them. We also immediately cashiered any teacher who entered the school grounds and forced them into party activities. I have fond memories of hearing my class teacher horribly butcher Oh my darling, Clementine before wandering off to listen to the school band play Hurra, hurra, die Schule brennt.

There was this time that one of the trouble boys from my class got into trouble with some dangerous guys from nearby. I never got the details right, rumor was that it was about stealing someone’s girlfriend, or just flirting with the girl. We were all 16 at the time.

Anyway, this one day, after classes ended and everyone was leaving, I was hanging outside school with my friends when we saw the trouble boy sprinting madly back inside, with a group of 4 following behind - all of them looking like late teenagers. The pursuers stayed outside for ~10 minutes before leaving and it seemed like one of them had a gun, as he wouldn’t take his hand off his hip (this is Brazil, btw, where gun possession is illegal).

Trouble boy skipped school the entire following week, which looked like it was enough to let the dust settle. Of course, rumors went wild, like one saying that he was ambushed and killed, but his younger sister was also at the school and kept coming, so it was easy to know the truth: he got grounded for the week and, to avoid being expelled for absences, got a magical medical “1 week off school” report.

A friend of mine, T, lent another guy, E, some money. Not a huge amount, but fairly significant for a high schooler, something like $50

E decides he’s not gonna pay T back, so like mature, responsible high school dudes, they decide they’re going to meet up at the park after school and fight over this.

T is not a big dude, and doesn’t really expect to win this fight, so he goes and gets his friend, M, to come along, not to participate, just to watch over things and make sure he doesn’t get killed. M is well equipped for this job being over 6ft tall and built like a brick shithouse. Nice dude.

E, apparently, also had some friends coming along with this, and they show up after school dressed like some kind of school shooters, wearing fatigues and trench coats and shit

And more importantly, sporting weapons- sharpened screwdrivers, a baseball bat, etc.

M does his job, and takes those from them, throws them in his backpack, with a jacket or something covering the protruding end of the bat.

Of course word of this whole shit show gets around, the school got wind of it, and had called the police.

So as this whole group is walking off of school grounds, cops show up and start rounding them up.

M of course gets nabbed being the one with baseball bat sticking out of his bag, as do E and his friends.

T, however, lucks the fuck out, because his older cousin happens to be driving by just as the cops are showing up, and gets him into her car, assuring the police that he was with her and not involved in this. Miraculously none of the other parties rat him out, so while the police managed to piece together that there was one other person involved, they never figured out who he was.

M gets sent of to an alternative school for a year, and is allowed to return after that on the condition that he joins the football team. Our football team did not win a single game our senior year.

The others get various similar punishments- suspensions, alternative schools, etc.

One of E’s friends, on being informed by the cops that this was over $50, flipped out a little, possibly flipped a table, and sat down and calmly told the cops that he had been misinformed, and that E had told him it was over significantly more than that.

The really wild part though, is how the high school rumor mill exaggerated this, there was a version of the story I heard where M attacked a cop with a samurai and tried to escape on a motorcycle.

It should also be noted that these guys all actually remained on relatively good terms after this.

And these were, overall, pretty decent, even boring, nerds otherwise. A couple of them have some of the usual sorts of childhood trauma and such (except for T, who has some serious, grade-a childhood trauma, I still see him regularly, he had some rough patches along the way but is in a really good place these days) none of them really ever ended up in any significant trouble again after that.

And the area we lived in was a pretty safe, boring, middle class suburban area. I’m pretty well qualified to say that because I now work at the county 911 center, so I get to see what kind of shit is happening where, and that area of our county has nothing going on. If any one of the towns there has a dozen serious incidents (not counting stuff like noise complaints, traffic stops, parking issues, minor traffic accidents, routine medical emergencies and fire issues, etc) in a week, that’s probably going to be one of the busiest weeks of their year.

We had this kid who basically cosplayed as Johnny Cash every day. Black slacks, dark button up shirt, guitar like a security blanket, whole 9 yards.

One day, he decides this isnt weird enough. He smuggles in a handle of vodka and jack Daniel’s in the trunk of his car. Goes out at lunch and domes the JD in less than 15 minutes. Goes back in and pretends it’s just business as usual. That lasts exactly until 5 minutes into the next class, which for him is PE.

Cue projectile vomiting, incoherent moaning/screaming, and he shit his pants. Ambulance was called, then the parents, then the cops.

Classic Dio.

My art teacher died during an open evening. He had a heart attack right in front of a young girl showing a group of people around. That’s when we found out both janitors had lied about their First Aid training. The guy running the cantine had to do CPR until the doctor came running in 20 minutes later. 20 minutes is incredibly hard to do. I’m still wondering why nobody took over (there were hundreds of people there) and why they called a doctor, not an ambulance.

This was in the nineties in Sweden. We had a small infestation of loser nazi skins, as was common at the time. They were loud and violent. The most loud and most violent was an adopted black guy. The rest of the nazi skins tolerated him in the group because of said qualities. Or maybe because he’d beat the shit out of them if they did not.

And before skinhead apologists enter the chat, yeah there are not neo nazi skins in the world. However in Sweden at the time it was their main attribute and main reason for shaving the head and wearing the uniform, despite a few outliers that hung around indiscriminately with the nazi ones anyway.

The weirdest thing I can even think of is more of a personal thing than something that affected a wide group of people attending the school.

I got called into the office second period on a Monday by my drama class teacher, just so he could talk shit about how my clan destroyed his clan in WoW over the weekend. 🤣

My entire year got suspended, then un-suspended on our last day of secondary (high school).

So it’s the last day and pranks abound as is the case in most schools. The usual harmless stuff.

Three lads decided that it would be the height of hilarious to fill a balloon with water and drop it out of the library window onto some unsuspecting eejit. Now I mean proper balloon, not the little water balloons you buy.

Anyway, they heaved it over to the window and dropped it. The library was on the third floor though so by the time it got to ground you’re talking about a lot of momentum. It would have been dangerous if it had hit someone.

They missed and hit a teacher’s car, instantly smashing the back window.

Word spread like wildfire and we’re all called into the library for a meeting of the full year. They say to dob in the culprits or we’re all suspended. If they come forward we know they’re going to be expelled though. Everyone knew who it was but they gave us time to talk it over amongst ourselves. The consensus was to keep our mouths shut after quite a bit of arguing.

Well, they suspended us all. We were all over 18 so went to the nearest pub. It was a bad end to a good time in the school and the atmosphere was really weird.

About an hour later the lads involved owned up and we were all reinstated. They were expelled though and weren’t allowed to sit their state exams in the school.

A Senior in my highschool in southeast Texas, back in the mid 90s, walked into the cafeteria dressed up in reinactment confederate civil war garb and shot himself in the head in front of everyone.

A group of students emptied blue ink from pens onto the stair handrails for a graduation prank.

It ended with paramedics being called to the highschool with police and news crews. Staff and students started to think it was a biological threat of sorts, as multiple random students started to get blue hands and eyes.

Same school a different year a bunch of students got on the roof and spray painted all the skylights black.

Seniors led a herd of cows into the school and locked them in for senior prank.

Another one

I was home sick one day, my sister was at school, the phone rings and I answered it. It was an automated message, something about the school being aware of a school shooting threat and that there was no danger at this time.

It was really light on details, I called my mom who worked at another school in the district, she had no clue what was up. I couldn’t really find much information, it kind of trickled out over the next couple of days.

A lot of parents went to pick their kids up early, my mom texted my sister to see if she wanted to be picked up she didn’t really care, enough kids left early that classes were basically put on hold and they were just goofing off and watching movies and such. There were a bunch of cops and news crews showing up at the school so she figured she was probably about as safe there as anywhere that day.

Anyway, eventually the details started coming out, there was a kid who was planning a shooting, it was still a long way off if it was ever going to happen at all, but he tried to recruit another kid, and that kid turned him in.

The would-be shooter didn’t actually go to our school, he was homeschooled. His parents had pulled him out because of bullying a few years prior. He was a few years younger than me, so I don’t think I was ever in the same school as him, I think he would have been a freshman when I was a senior.

Now my school didn’t exactly have a major bullying issue, it happened a bit, like it does in every school, but I’d be hard-pressed to think of anyone who had it especially bad.

Now this kid was fat, he may have been almost as wide as he was tall, and I’m sure he got plenty of bullying for that, but this is America, we had plenty of kids in our school who were just as fat, and again, no major bullying problems. Hell, I am/was pretty fat myself, and a bit of a weirdo to boot, and I was actually fairly popular in high school.

But apparently the real reason this guy was bullied was because he was just a real racist, misogynistic, homophobic asshole. If anyone deserved to be bullied, it was probably him. He basically was a bully himself, he was just too pathetic for anyone to take him seriously.

And yes, it does sound a lot like I’m describing Eric Cartman.

He did have one gun (that his parents apparently bought him) but no ammo, as well as a bunch of mall ninja swords and such, and a bunch of airsoft and pellet guns. Of course the local police made a big deal of showing off his “arsenal” when they confiscated it. I almost wanted to see his fat ass trying to lug all of that shit into school with him. I doubt he would have made it up the front stairs of the building before getting winded.

But it doesn’t end there.

Remember the kid who he tried to recruit who turned him in? He of course got all the congratulations from the mayor and police chief and such that you’d expect. And then he tried to break into the would-be shooters house to steal his Xbox.

And at some point during the various trials and such, the would-be shooters mom got in trouble for trying to smuggle him food while he was in juvie.

Story: Someone spray-painted the ag farm cows.

First-hand experience: A friend fingered another friend while we were all huddled for group discussion during a class. It was super casual. The rest of us looked away awkwardly or tried to continue the conversation.

Rumors:

• a sub teacher let a boy grab her breast
• one kid was caught jorkin it in the drama class dressing room
• a new sub teacher kept repeatedly adjusting his crotch
• someone put Minecraft on the typing lab computers (it was me)

People dropping water balloons off the roof onto the Principal’s head the last day of school.

A girl decided she wanted to ride the stick shift in her pickup. She got on, then got off, then discovered she was stuck and couldn’t pull out. This was before the days of cell phones. Not sure how she got someone’s attention so they could call 911.(emergency)