A joke or a crime?
Countless school administrators are grappling with that question as they deal with traditional end-of-year senior pranks ranging from a few loose chickens in the hallways to massive food fights in the cafeteria.
Southern Lehigh High School officials weren't amused by seniors' latest prank -- they called for police involvement and suspended 17 students for five days for scaling the school walls and camping inside an enclosed courtyard. Three of them may lose their National Honor Society membership.
They weren't the only students facing stiff penalties for pranks this week. Six seniors in Wisconsin who built a swing set on the school roof were suspended and restricted from going to their graduation ceremony.
In a Minnesota school, 70 seniors who rode bikes, scooters and skateboards through the halls were not allowed back in school. Another student who wanted to end his year by starting a food fight was fined by police for disorderly conduct.
Mel Riddile, a director with the National Association of Secondary Schools, said senior pranks have been a tradition for decades as students feel the urge to leave their mark before graduation. He recalled a prank at his school in the 1970s, when students used a crane to put a car on a flagpole.
But tougher security measures in a post-Columbine era have changed how officials react to pranks. ''No question we live in the context of the times,'' he said. ''Breaking into schools and letting animals loose was a prank in the '70s and '80s. Today, that could be considered a terrorist act.''
Case in point: In 2005, senior Matthew A. Pattison donned a gorilla mask and sheepskin shawl and climbed onto the roof of Oley Valley High School in Berks County. The stunt triggered an emergency response that included the FBI and a bomb squad. Police officers took Pattison off the roof at gunpoint as students remained locked in their classrooms with blinds drawn.
Officials defended the response as ''standard procedure'' in the wake of the Columbine and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But after a two-day trial in Berks County Court, Pattison was found not guilty of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, and defiant trespass, a summary offense.
''The problem is nowadays you don't know whether something is supposed to be a joke or is real,'' said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. ''And there have been too many incidents where what appeared to be a prank was not. It's a pity, because we all remember our days as students and the pranks we pulled as a rite of passage.''
Southern Lehigh Superintendent Joseph P. Liberati said there has been a long history of pranks at the school, a trend that has progressively become more dangerous. He recalled previous years when someone left a dead deer on the roof of the school. In 2005, students released crabs in school. In both instances, he said: ''We were not able to find the guilty parties.''
In 2006, however, students who spread oil in the school's main hall were caught and barred from attending their graduation ceremony, he said.
''Unfortunately, it has become commonplace for graduating seniors to engage in pranks as part of their rite of passage from high school into the adult world,'' he said. ''It's viewed as this entitlement and rite of passage. But it has a negative connotation. That's not what we're all about.''
Friday, before about 75 students gathered to protest the punishment resulting from Monday's camping prank, Liberati sat down with a few students and shared the school's perspective.
''We talked about the escalation of pranks, how classes try to top the prior year and how that becomes problematic,'' he said. ''What happened this week is out of the ordinary for Southern Lehigh. This is not usually how we're viewed. My hope is that there will be greater communication with everyone.''
Riddile said educators are doing more to make expectations and boundaries clear as prank season approaches.
A few years ago at Montgomery County's North Penn High School, students jammed 35,000 forks into the school lawn creating a display that read: ''We will never Fork-get you, North Penn.''
''It caught us totally by surprise,'' said Principal Burton Hynes. ''It didn't take long for kids to gauge our reaction. Our approach was 'OK, it's funny, we got a laugh. Now clean it up.' They made their point without causing damage or harm to anyone.''
ANCFlyer wrote:We had a major rivalry with a neighboring High School and should probably have been prosecuted for some of the things we did . . . no, not blowing stuff up, or hurting people, or anything of the sort . . . .
Just some activity with mini-dozers and a football field . . . . oh, and Blue and Yellow Spray Paint.
We did sell elevator passes to the Freshman also, but I suppose everyone did that.
Case in point: In 2005, senior Matthew A. Pattison donned a gorilla mask and sheepskin shawl and climbed onto the roof of Oley Valley High School in Berks County. The stunt triggered an emergency response that included the FBI and a bomb squad. Police officers took Pattison off the roof at gunpoint as students remained locked in their classrooms with blinds drawn.
Officials defended the response as ''standard procedure'' in the wake of the Columbine and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But after a two-day trial in Berks County Court, Pattison was found not guilty of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, and defiant trespass, a summary offense.
''The problem is nowadays you don't know whether something is supposed to be a joke or is real,'' said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. ''And there have been too many incidents where what appeared to be a prank was not. It's a pity, because we all remember our days as students and the pranks we pulled as a rite of passage.''
from me. The bomb squad and the FBI? If I were the ranking officer on scene, the school administration would get an ass chewing from me. Oy.
LOT 737-300 wrote:I didn't do anything for a senior prank, nor did any graduating class from the High School I went to since I graduated in 2006 as sneaking in is a very difficult task because of the school's "prison like" design and location.
The High School that I went to for my freshman year (the one I graduated to was being built as an overflow) though pulled off an EPIC one this year. They got into the school and walked into a part of the school known as "portable city." After that, they ended up taking all the tables, chairs and desks from the insides of the portables and put them on the roof of the school. It was apparently epic enough that it made the BBC back in April.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8014324.stm
The vid does very little justice to it though to show the true size of this, as most here may not know the true size of Portable city. Portable City is a place where freshmen (and some sophomores) take their classes there, and because of the large student population (at last check, around 4500-5000 students, originally built in 1992 for 2500), they need to safely put them in portables to fit fire code. So you have this massive area of the school that consists of some 70 Portable classrooms.
Airfoilsguy wrote:LOT 737-300 wrote:I didn't do anything for a senior prank, nor did any graduating class from the High School I went to since I graduated in 2006 as sneaking in is a very difficult task because of the school's "prison like" design and location.
The High School that I went to for my freshman year (the one I graduated to was being built as an overflow) though pulled off an EPIC one this year. They got into the school and walked into a part of the school known as "portable city." After that, they ended up taking all the tables, chairs and desks from the insides of the portables and put them on the roof of the school. It was apparently epic enough that it made the BBC back in April.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8014324.stm
The vid does very little justice to it though to show the true size of this, as most here may not know the true size of Portable city. Portable City is a place where freshmen (and some sophomores) take their classes there, and because of the large student population (at last check, around 4500-5000 students, originally built in 1992 for 2500), they need to safely put them in portables to fit fire code. So you have this massive area of the school that consists of some 70 Portable classrooms.
I can't believe that you caused a significant disruption to that poor woman's school day.
