Senior Pranks

By Brooke Herbes | Writer   &  Jenna Nevarez | Writer

May 20, 2015

With graduation day just around the corner, another more underground ritual hit the campus on May 6th 2015: the “Senior Prank.” Teachers and students can try to stop them, but we know they’re coming.

We both love and hate the messy mark seniors leave on our school. Everyone takes part in them one way or another even if they aren’t doing the dirty work.

Allegedly, the night before, a least a dozen seniors gathered at the school with syrup, honey, loads of toilet paper, and a substance that looked like yogurt or eggs. They treated our empty quad like their canvas on which to wreak havoc. From toilet paper in the trees and bushes, toilet paper on the ground, eggs on the doors, and most importantly, 2015 written out in toilet paper covered in honey and syrup, this prank was interesting to say the absolutely least.

When zero period students arrived to school, they were surrounded by the disaster. Freshmen in Mrs. Kerr’s zero period Biology class were especially shocked. Led by their fearless teacher, Mrs. Kerr and her class set out to clean up the vandalism. They all grab a green trash bag and start the early morning privilege of picking up the questionable mess.

“As a zero period teacher, I am generally one of the first to find them, and I always work with my class to clean them up,” Mrs. Kerr said. This makes sense, and given that she is the AP Environmental Science teacher, it makes perfect sense.

Sometimes they are rewarded for their good deed and sometimes not. “Mr. Halt gave us all donuts as a ‘Thank you,’” Mrs. Kerr told us. She described how “the students feel empowered when they can right what was wrong.”

Many teachers took on campus it as a reminder of their own high school pranks. We asked Mrs. Jobst about her graduating class’s pranks and she told us. Mrs. Jobst went to Rockford East High School in Rockford, IL and graduated in 1992.  This must have been the year of pranks, because the scene she described would have been too much for SCHS to handle.

She told us, “I think they hired a crane to put rubber tires all the way up the flagpole. It wasn’t my idea, and I didn’t participate in it even though I was involved in just about every club in high school.”

Not all schools do senior pranks, however. Mrs. Kerr, who went to Laguna Beach High School, told us that her graduating class did not. Therefore, in respect of an organized learning environment, she helps clean up the pranks every year.

Senior pranks may be fun to do but not to clean up. The faculty definitely does not encourage them, but they have not yet devised a way to stop the mischievous seniors. But we at SCHS can count on Mrs. Kerr’s zero period Biology class to clean up thesenior pranks of 2015 and years to come.