A Principal Gives Keys to the School to Kids So They Can Pull a Senior Prank. And to the Surprise of No One But Her, They Demolish the Place.
For as long as there have been schools, there have been school pranks. Fred and George Weasley may have perfected the art in Order of the Phoenix, but by no means did they invent it. It's a time honored tradition that goes back to the very first days of formal education. And the natural result of a building filled with immature, undeveloped, hormonal brains under the supervision of older people who ostensibly take their responsibilities seriously.
In its simplest form, it can be anything from everyone switching desks or all dropping their books at the same time. It can be escalated to writing, say, "Dick Hurtz" and "Heywood Yablowme" on the attendance sheet, or pulling a John Bender and taking the screw out of the library door at the expense of poor, hapless Mr. Vernon and his $31,000 a year.
Then finally, there's the institutional kind of practical joke. The Senior Prank. Traditionally, the Senior Prank has peaked out as harmless gags like styrofoam pellets in the air ducts to make it look like it's snowing. Plastic wrapping the cafeteria tables. Filling offices with balloons. Flash Mobs. Glitter bombs and the like. Where I grew up there was an ice cream place that had a full sized fiberglass cow on the roof, and pretty much every year someone would cownap it, as hilarity ensued.
Of course, these things I'm talking about are relics of a bygone past. Products of the culture of the 2000s and earlier that have no place in the 2020s. Ancient practices that belong on the ash heap of history along with riding your bike to school, having peanut butter in your lunch, and getting screamed at by your parents for talking back to your teacher. That cow story sounds so much like Abe Lincoln walking five miles to school, I'm embarrassed I even brought it up. Such quaint tales have no place in a world were every kid has a device in their pocket that allows them to watch porn in the middle of Trigonometry.
But at least there's one adult who not only still believes in the Senior Prank, but has faith the Social Media Age hasn't produced a generation of monstrous anarchists. At least she didn't. But now she's been set straight. The hard way:
Source - A North Carolina principal is under fire after handing over keys to the school to let students pull off a 'senior prank' that created mass chaos and left teachers 'in tears.'
Burns High Principal Jennifer Aberly thought a few students were going to put up streamers and balloons on Thursday last week - but arrived the next morning to find significant damage in the hallways and classrooms.
Students greased floors and door handles, put potted plants in toilets, stacked desks, and scattered teachers' personal belongings while inside unsupervised. ...
Students used 'globs of vaseline' to cover door handles and slathered baby oil on hallway floors to make the surfaces slippery when walking, Blanton said.
One photo shows a potted plant placed directly inside a toilet bowl in one of the school's bathrooms.
The board member also said a microwave was dropped into the water.
Another picture is of chairs and desks that were pulled out of classrooms and stacked on top of each other in the corridors.
In arguably the most concerning image shared by the board member, ceiling tiles appear to have been pulled down while items are littered around one room.
Board member Ronnie Grigg said teachers also came into their classrooms to find their own personal items removed from private locations and scattered. ...
[S]tudents were inside the school for several hours.
Of course they were inside the school for several hours. Annihilating a public building takes time. You can't get 95% of these Adderal addicts to pay attention through your average Little League game or focus for the half hour it takes to mow the lawn on Father's Day. But give them a school to trash and they can stay on the task like they're bingeing Euphoria.
But the focus here should be on Principal Aberly. You can say I shouldn't kick her while she's down, but that's the perfect time to kick anyone. She's right at foot level and deserves a boot for this. Seriously, lady. What utopian dimension did you just beam down from to still believe in the Honor System exists? It's 2023, sister. The naive ridiculousness of trusting your fellow man to do good things went out the window about 20 years, thousand of riots, and hundreds of mass killings ago.
I mean, has she never seen a TikTok? How could any adult not be aware of the level of raging, nihilistic narcissism filling her classrooms? Tossing the keys to American high schoolers and hoping for the best is like inviting a Viking raiding party into your monastery and expecting to find no missing gold or dead monks in the morning. You welcome anarchists into your world, don't act surprised when they do anarchist things.
As they said in Super Troopers:
- Mac: But our shenanigans are cheeky and fun!
- Thorny: Yeah, and [Farva's] shenanigans are cruel and tragic.
- Foster: Which… makes them not really shenanigans at all.
- Mac: Evil shenanigans!
The real kick in the head here is going to come when they check the security footage and the social media posts, start identifying these kids, and they all start ratting on each other to get a better deal. Not because anyone will face actual punishment or have to pay for the damage. No, that's when the parents of these creeps will scream bloody murder that their precious angels are innocent. And even if they're weren't, there's not a damn thing you can do about it, and you'll hear from their lawyer. Because while these kids are, in fact, monsters, they didn't just appear out of nowhere. They were created by the Dr. Frankenstein's that raised them. So enjoy the hike in your property taxes to fix the school somebody else's little shit destroyed, everyone. Hope your next principal has a clue what she's dealing with.