High School Senior Prank Shows Genius

It’s Spring, the time for flowers, birds, bees, pollen…and senior pranks! Maybe you’ve heard about the (IMO) brilliant senior prank pulled off by the students at two cross-county high school rivals in Alabama this week. Did these teenage delinquents paint graffiti? Did they release pigs or goats into the school? Did they urinate on the gym floors or break windows or paint one another’s football fields? No. Did they, in fact, destroy any school property? Nope. They switched schools. Oh, the horror. 

Students from Chilton County High School (CCHS) and Jemison High School (JHS) planned their prank through a Snapchat group message. A total of 12 students from CHHS and 4 students from JHS decided that they would swap schools and attend their rivals’ school campus for the day. One student even wore a Spiderman suit. Shocking behavior! 

The students claim that it took a couple of hours for school officials to figure out what was going on. “We got to the school around 7:50-55 a.m. and we stayed til 9:20 a.m. without getting caught or anything. The teachers and stuff, they didn’t notice.”

Their prank has caused quite a commotion, but most of the commotion is over the school admiistrators’ over-the-top responses. Some students were suspended, others were removed from sports teams, and others say they’ve been threatened with the loss of scholarships. Chilton County Schools Superintendent Jason Griffin initially provided the standard response right out of the administrator’s handbook: “Due to safety protocols, employee and student privacy rights, I will be unable to provide a statement or response.” Griffin followed up his initial statement with this jewel: “Chilton County Schools follows law, policy and procedure in all aspects of day to day operations.” Come on, Jason, get your panties out of a wad and acknowledge that these kids outsmarted you.

While it may seem outrageous that the trespassing students walked past administrators and security officers without being noticed, I find that easy to believe. I was the principal at a high school with around 800 students, and I’d be lying if I said that I knew the names and faces of all 800. In fact, on graduation day, when I handed out a diploma to each and every graduate, there were a few faces that I didn’t recognize. And could a student have walked past me in a Spiderman costume without setting my Spidey senses a-tingling? Heck yeah. Have you seen what kids wear to school these days? As long as the Spiderman costume covered cleavage and butt-cracks and did not cover the student’s face, you wouldn’t have heard a complaint from this school administrator. 

Is there a security problem in the school? Probably. Is it easy to fix? No, not really. The easiest solution is for students to show IDs by entering a checkpoint. It may sound easy to someone who hasn’t worked in a school, but even a “simple” solution is rife with problems, and these are just a few.

• Fake IDs–If you don’t think a high school student can produce or locate a genuine-looking fake ID, you’ve got another think coming.
• Personnel to staff the checkpoints–Sounds simple, but it’s not. There are too many issues to go into, but if you have questions, feel free to stay afterward for the Q&A session.
• Accurately checking IDs–Please reference the above-mentioned Q&A section.

Here’s the real problem, and I’m coming from the perspective of a retired high school principal with a 30 years’ total classroom and administrative experience. If the students are correctly stating the facts, it took a couple of hours for teachers to realize that there were students in their classrooms that they didn’t recognize. At the END of the school year. WTHeck??  The only possible excuse that I can come up with is that there were substitutes in all the classrooms that the students attended that day, but so far, that information has not been disclosed. This is not a student discipline problem. This is a personnel/leadership problem.

Should the students suffer the consequences of their actions? Maybe. I can only speak for the school district where I worked. Would the students have been suspended? Doubtful. Would they be prosecuted for trespassing? Even more doubtful. Would they be sent in-school suspension for skipping classes? Probably not. My response would have been to mark the students’ absences as unexcused. And then I would have laughed and commended them for using those problem-solving skills that we’ve been preaching about for years