Archive for June 9th, 2007
Senior Pranks
June 9th, 2007
I hate senior pranks. Because I take personal responsibility for everything that happens in our school, I also take senior pranks personally. And as a person who’s dedicated the last seventeen years of my life to making schools better for kids, I find senior pranks to be disrespectful and ungrateful, selfish acts.
The single thing about senior pranks that ticks me off to no end is that it’s almost always a prank that results in additional work for our hard working cleaning and custodial crew. This infuriates me– that the women and men who tirelessly and quietly clean up after us day in and day out should be “thanked” in this way.
When I arrived at school earlier this week, Carol and Maggie had been working since 6:00 am to clean up the gunk that was on an entire hallway of lockers. It took them two hours to clean every locker. Who did those students prank? Just Carol and Maggie and they don’t deserve it.
Yesterday a military smoke bomb was set off in the girls’ lav near my front entrance. The school was evacuated, Regents reviews were disrupted, police were sent to the school. And the smoke was incredibly strong so I worried about every student and staff member who filed by with asthma or allergies. The police reacted strongly because in today’s climate they have to consider that something like this could be a diversion for worse behavior elsewhere in the school.
In my next post, I’ll write about how we handled both incidents and how they were resolved.
