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.
Just a week or so ago I was saying that to clean things is the janitor’s job, that that is why they are paid so nobody should grumble about their extra work. I have a slightly different perspective now though. For a few months now I have just wanted my birthday to come so that I could think of myself as an adult. I just wanted to be able to go out and live on my own and do as I choose if that was what I wanted. I’ve realized this past week though that there’s a lot of things I just don’t think about and it’s a little scary. For example I never thought about people with allergies or even that getting the school to evacuate could be thought of as a diversion for something bigger. Honestly I didn’t even think about the possibility that someone could get hurt evacuating. Something I didn’t think about with the janitors is who would want to get up 2 hours earlier to go do extra work? Not very many people unless they really need the money. I am sorry about all this trouble I’ve caused, believe me I never meant to have this outcome. I now know that I wasn’t thinking a bit. Looking back I hardly thought at all, I didn’t think about the worst possible outcome which is something I need to learn to do. I’m sorry for all the things I didn’t realize and the ones that I know I still don’t realize.
Senior pranks can end up creating all sorts of havoc today. What once was considered a “harmless” prank can cost taxpayers thousands of dollars today. I liked the idea of creating a senior prank–the moveable mascot.
Yep. I’m with you. I hate them — always have. they feel disrespectful… as if the students have to leave on a poor note.
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This whole “senior prank” thing is relatively new to me. Before coming to Colorado, I’d seen exactly one in 9 years in education. It involved a mayoral candidate’s son (of all people!) pouring gasoline onto the lawn of the school to spell out the year of graduation, and then igniting it. Nice, huh?
Since coming to Colorado, I’ve seen quite a few. Most of them completely distasteful.
“Egging” all the outer doors of the building? Spray painting “Class of 2006” in 10-foot letters in the parking lot last year? Super glue in the locks on classroom doors? Come on, seniors. You’re more resourceful than that…
As David mentioned above, it is possible to be witty without being disrespectful.
Our HS principal helped channel the senior pranks by creating a traditional prank… the “borrowing” of our Black Knight in our lobby. Students have found unusual places to relocate the knight, and it helps to have this outlet for Seniors’ “energy”. It helps a little… but hasn’t completely fixed the problem.
Messy pranks do put an unreasonable burden on our own cleaning and janitorial staff. They also make a class seem thoughtless and unoriginal. This year, after a relatively tolerable finger painting of windows (good that they used finger paint, I guess), the mess was cleaned up by our staff, which I hated, but the seniors returned for another round of painting. By day two, we’d reached our limit. After an investigation, we had offending seniors out scrubbing the walls.
Other pranks seem downright cruel. One year, a group of clowns brought in a baby pig and set it loose in our hallway a few years ago. The pig was terrified.
Here’s a proposed formula for seniors: Your pranks should be clever — they should dazzle. Show us how amazing and resourceful our graduates can be. A truly clever prank would avoid putting any burden on our hard-working cleaners and staff. And no one should get hurt. Seniors: make us laugh and wonder and wish you’d never leave.