Schools are meant to be a safe haven for children. A place where they can learn and grow without having to worry about anything else. Unfortunately, some bad people choose to do bad things at the or around the very place that is supposed to be safe, creating massive scandals for school. These are real stories of school scandals of the years. Some stories have been edited for clarification purposes.
Up In Smoke
“Two girls burnt down our snack shack by the football field. Me and a friend were in P.E. running the track when two girls went into the bathroom of the snack shack. At the time, I had been running backwards and had seen their faces, while my friend had only seen the back of their heads. A few moments later, they exit and smoke begins to emerge from the bathrooms. Apparently they were smoking J’s and threw the still lit blunts into the garbage, filled with paper towels. The funny thing was that the football field was our evacuation point in the case of an emergency, but that was where the emergency was happening. The entire snack shack, which is basically a small kitchen, was soon in flames and it was all put out about 20 minutes later.
Walking back to class, me and my friend were discussing the possibility of those two girls starting the fire, and sure enough, not even 5 minutes into our next class, we are pulled into the office with a police officer, asking us for a description of the two girls. Apparently after checking the cameras around the school, they were able to identify me and my friend on the track, because I ran backwards for a few feet.
They tried to get me to sign a paper saying that I would testify in court about seeing the two girls, but I didn’t want to be incorporated into all this anymore than I was already, so I refused. My friend said he would.
In the end, girls were identified, expelled, sent to Juvie for a little. The snack shack was destroyed, open and shut case of arson.
Funny thing though was that when the police went to detain one of the girls, their mom had her leg broken by police and she sued the city, and was awarded like $2 million. I guess things happen for a reason.”
A Rather Public Announcement
“I went to a small Christian high school that also had a middle and elementary school on the grounds. The principal of the high school had a child that was in my grade. One day he comes over the intercom and announces that he’s stepping down from his position. He then goes on to talk about how he and the female gym coach had been having an ’emotional affair’ for the last few months. This announcement goes through every speaker in all three schools. I remember everyone in my class looking over at his daughter who had a look a complete surprise on her face. From what I gathered this was the first time she was hearing about all of this.
Shortly after the gym teacher also left her position, but the most interesting part? The gym teacher had no idea this was going on. She was just doing her job and thought she was friends with everyone. The principal read more into their relationship and decided to go to the church with it and they made this decision. The gym teacher left her job out of shame and had to spend a lot of time explaining to her husband what exactly was going on.
The gym teacher’s husband took a little time to realize that there was no actual affair that went on. After that they rumors and gossip in the area got to be too much and he ended up getting a different job pretty far away and moved them both to start fresh.
The principal and his wife got a divorce within a day or so of the announcement. The wife got custody of all three kids, plus I think eventually their house and a fair amount of money. The former principal took a job selling either cars or furniture, I can’t remember which, and pretty much faded from the radar. I don’t think his eldest daughter had anything to do with him after all of that. I wanna say that she intentionally made sure he stayed away from her wedding.”
Brotherly Love
“A year after I graduated high school, a woman was stabbed 40+ times with a pair of scissors while jogging on our track on a Sunday. One of the guys in that year’s senior class wound up hanging around the track over the following days, obsessively pestering investigators with questions and theories, so naturally some suspicion fell on him. When the woman’s description of her assailant (she survived!) matched him spot-on, he was arrested, and both the scissors used and his bloody clothes were found at his house. Dude was sentenced to 10+ years in prison.
End of story, right?
Wrong. Two years after the trial, the jailed kid is ordered released after his little brother, one year younger and a dead lookalike for his big bro, is popped for violent assault on a woman, and confesses to the stabbing during questioning. Turns out the older brother took the fall for him, falsely confessing so that he could keep his younger sib out of jail. Dude never told anyone, but did admit the lie after his younger brother’s arrest and confession.
I knew both kids when I was a student there. Both brothers were definitely thought to be weirdly intense, but their behavior was attributed to their military dad’s strict style of parenting, and not anything darker.”
Timberrrrr
“My high school districts’s superintendent hired a relative who wasn’t qualified for the job, increased the salary of administrators every year, used the district’s credit card to buy meals, groceries, gas, personal electronics, and gift cards. When the state audit went through, they said that the overpay of administrators and the personal spending cost the school district around 1.1 million dollars. Her husband was also an administrator.
When she eventually got caught, she just retired and for some reason never faced federal charges. When she retired, she had a $260,518 salary. My favorite part is that the state audit discovered that the district’s credit card was used to purchase logging equipment the same month the superintendent’s husband filed paperwork to open a timber company. Everyone knew there was corruption in the school district, but no audits or investigations happened until someone was threatened by the superintendent’s husband on Facebook.”
A Terrible Way To Postpone A Conference
“A 7 year old kid was found dead in the school’s washroom. It was a national news for many many months during which the investigation was ongoing.
Initially it was claimed by the police that one of the bus drivers was responsible for the murder. He confessed on the same a day, later claiming that he was going to force himself upon the kid but when he resisted, the driver killed him.
But the kid’s parents were not convinced that that was the case and claimed that the school was hiding a bigger conspiracy, since many of the evidence in the crime scene were tampered with before the police were notified and arrived on the scene. They pressured the government to involve the CBI and let them investigate instead of the local policemen. Later on, giving in to the rising pressure from the whole country, including a Supreme Court ruling, the CBI was called in to investigate. The CBI are basically the Indian equivalent of the FBI. During the investigation, the CBI found out that the driver was just a scapegoat and was forced to confess, which was claimed by other drivers since the very beginning. The driver later said that he was forced under police torture to admit to killing the child.
As the investigation continued, it turned out that the murder was committed by a 15 year old kid, who apparently wanted to postpone the upcoming Parent-Teacher conference since the parents were gonna be notified of his recent bullying attitude towards his classmates. So this guy decided that the best way to get them delayed was for him to kill someone and cause a police investigation in the school. His name was never publicly announced, but the students obviously knew who the guy was. I knew him personally and I could never have guessed in a thousand years that that guy could do something like that. It’s also unbelievably scary to think that he also almost got away with the murder.”
The Bathroom Ban
“So my school has a reputation for being weird in the bathrooms. It’s mostly the guys doing this but we’ve had people bring lemons, cucumbers, gold fish, watermelons, and a literal desk into the stalls and obviously into the toilet. Someone even set a toilet on fire once which I think is appropriate foreshadowing for what was about to occur.
Apparently someone drew a swastika in one of the stalls and that ended up being the last straw for the principle who decides to close half of the boys bathrooms indefinitely and have everyone attempting to use the other half of the bathrooms have to sign their name, being an ID card, etc. This was also done to try and stop kids from smoking weed in the stalls, a common pastime for boys and girls alike.
But whatever the case, everyone completely lost their minds. People were calling it a human rights violation and in protest began peeing in the stairwells. I think someone also took a dump in the stairs too but I’m not completely sure. And look, we’re not a bad school, in fact we’re somewhat prestigious, we’re supposedly smart engineers and everything. But no, no, all that goes straight out the window as the school of 6,000 kids decides to revert back to primal instincts in prospect of a stupid bathroom policy.
The scandal only came to an end when one day, one of the floors begins to emit a suspicious smell. Everyone assumes the chemistry kids are cooking marshmallows or something until eventually, someone uses the boys bathroom and finds a makeshift trash can incinerator filled with heaps of burning garbage, discarded paper, and now liquid plastic.
The principal decided it was best to open the bathrooms again.”
Made Up Man
“We had a teacher that was SUPER cool. She would let us show up late for class and go get food so long as we’d bring her a coffee when we got back. She’d cuss during class and she even had us do one of those Freedom Writers things where we wrote negative stereotypes, etc on the blackboard to discuss society issues or whatever.
Anyway, one day she comes into class wearing a ring and the girls noticed immediately. She told us all she was engaged to her high school sweetheart and that they were getting married soon as he was going to be deployed Afghanistan. Shortly after this, she stated going to my church and even brought her two daughters along.
One day a couple months later, she came into class and passed out a newspaper clipping describing the death of her husband and she told the class the heartbreaking story of his death and how she was leaving for his burial in Arlington at the end of the week.
For some reason, one of the students in my class decided to look up her husband on Facebook. Turns out the guy was still actively using the site. My classmate asked him if he knew this teacher and told him the story of him supposedly dying in Afghanistan.
Turns out the teacher lied, obviously. The guy said she’d been obsessed with him since high school and that she had always been a little nuts.
That teacher never did come back to school. I had her personal number and remember texting her after the news broke saying something to the effect of ‘Is it true?’ If I remember her response correctly, it was something like ‘Oh, grow up.’
Her Facebook, etc were deleted shortly after and I have no idea what happened to that woman.”
Peeping Tom
“At my the middle school, there was an 8th grade teacher/basketball coach that got caught recording videos in the girls locker room.
How? Well one of the girl noticed a hole in the ceiling and something in said hole. She and a few others investigated and found it was a phone set on record.
The scum bag coach came up trying to take phone from girl and a female teacher saw the situation unfolding but thankfully heard out the female student.
The female teacher looked through the phone and found multiple videos and took it further up and eventually got to the authorities.
Under further investigation, his room was searched and the K9 Units found traces of smack somewhere in his room. Turns out he was constantly showing up to school under the influence of it and also wasted off his mind.
If I remember correctly, he had to be taken to a different county because the girl that found the phone was a daughter of the gentleman in charge of the city SWAT team.”
Nobody Believed Her
“In high school, I knew this girl that liked to brag she was sleeping with the assistant principal. She told everyone and we all just kinda brushed it off like ‘yeah yeah sure’ because she was the type to say anything to get attention. I’m sure some teachers heard about it but thought the same thing, I’m serious when I say she told everyone.
About a year after I personally heard about it and rolled my eyes, it turns out they were smashing on the regular and had been since she was in 7th grade. The dude’s wife apparently had suspected it but didn’t have any proof, and then she overheard them talking on the phone and she hopped on his Facebook to find pictures and detailed conversations about their hookups. Why she waited years of suspicion to check his Facebook if she had open access to it, I’ll never know.
But the best part of this story is the local newspaper’s article on it. It, for some reason, randomly mentioned one of their hookups where he took her home after school that day instead of her riding the bus and she blew him in his car. At the end he offered her a travel sized mouthwash. I have no idea why this was so specified in the news article but I found it hilarious.
He, of course, lost his job, lost his wife and kids, and I think he went to jail. We all knew she was doing it and nobody seemed to care because she bragged about it instead. Instead of seeming traumatized or upset, she was totally willing through the whole thing so I’m not sure what happened as far as charges being pressed and all that. I’m sure her parents freaked out and tried to send him away forever but because she was consenting even under the age of consent the legal stuff got messy really quickly and I stayed the heck out of it.”
The Senior Trip
“Gonna try to keep this as vague as possible to avoid accidentally exposing the perpetrators…
The class before me did some things that led the district to ban senior ‘cruises’ (i.e., a vacation near or just after the end of the last school year). Granted, they couldn’t really enforce it, but they did ban all fundraising events for senior cruises from taking place on school grounds.
On this senior cruise, one of the girls got blackout wasted and passed out on the floor. One of our star football players decided it would be a great idea to gather everyone up, strip the girl naked, and cram all types of objects into places they did not belong. He also wrote all types of slurs on her. Kids were taking photos of the deed and there was even a videotape.
The ringleader and one or two of his buddies got some jail time, but everyone else got away with fines and/or community service, and most of their records are sealed (due to having been minors at the time of the crime). It also helped that several of the parents involved were lawyers, and one of them may have even been the local DA.
I knew the guy’s sister, she was in my classes. I never saw her smile again after the news broke.”
A Call For Help
“In middle school in the late 90s, someone was sending threatening emails to all the popular girls. Real nasty stuff detailing how they were going to be murdered in the night in their beds type thing. The FBI got involved, and it turned out the one who sent the message was one of the girls who was targeted.
She was obviously expelled and we didn’t see her again, but she was also dead before we finished college. Apparently they found her body in the river and ruled it suicide. In hindsight she was probably suffering from mental illness already in middle school and never could handle it.”
The Fake-booker
“Okay, so there was this random Facebook account that popped up and started adding everyone from my high school (I had graduated a few years prior, but he was adding current and former students). And the account’s first post was something basically saying if this girl that went to the school didn’t apologize for what she had done, he was gonna shoot up the school. So school closed down for a day, but no arrests were made. So then the evening after school had been cancelled, this dude posts again, STILL demanding this girl apologize. And then he started posting provocative photos of her. It was close enough to Christmas break that school just shut down a few days early.
Over break, things got progressively more nuts. This dude was threatening peoples’ lives, demanding an apology from this girl that apparently did something to him, posting photos and videos of her, and also taunting the authorities that they couldn’t catch him. And they didn’t. Several arrests were made (including the son of a manager that worked for me at the time), but everyone was let go.
I think the height of it for me personally was when my wife and I were eating at a Red Robin across the street from our town’s outdoor mall, and I saw a post from this random account that said he just found out the female student was at the mall, and he was on his way with AR’s and pipe bombs and stuff, and if she didn’t publicly apologize, it was going to be a bloodbath. So from Red Robin, while I’m pounding this Prime Chophouse burger, my wife and I watch emergency vehicles rush to the mall. The guy never showed, though.
At some point, the posts just kind of stopped. And an arrest hadn’t been made with the suspect being proven to be this guy. Then several months later, there was a Tumblr post where this guy was taking credit for the whole thing, saying he hacked a random girl’s iCloud account and did his social media terrorism from there. But I still don’t think he was caught at that point (and I’m not even sure that he ended up being the culprit). A few months after that, the guy was finally arrested in California, and I remember reading that he was only caught because of some personal information he had put on an email account he had set up to use for this whole thing.
But yeah, it was crazy that a random person could put an entire town on edge like that. I remember that for those few weeks, I just kept wondering what this girl did to upset the dude THAT bad.”
MTV Famous
“Once upon a time, MTV produced a reality TV show called ‘Made’). Each episode was about some teenager who wanted to self-improve in some way. Maybe some kid wanted to become a cheerleader, or a dancer, or an actor, or an athlete, or whatever. MTV would set them up with a life coach/fitness trainer/tutor/whatever, and capture their progress as they were ‘made’ into the better person they wanted to be.
My classmate, ‘Beans,’ had no such lofty ambitions. He was a total mess-up burn-out. All he wanted to do was graduate high school. He had already failed at this (yup, he was a super-senior). MTV picked him. I still can’t imagine why.
So my whole senior year, MTV camera crews were roaming the halls of my high school, mostly following Beans, but others were capturing other shots of the building and the students. Beans had a mentor assigned to him. Some tough-as-nails wannabe drill sergeant to push Beans in the right direction. Someone to get Beans to study, stop partying, stop smoking, and basically stop getting in trouble.
Beans didn’t change one bit. He kept smoking, he kept partying, he kept getting in trouble, he remained a delinquent. He and his idiot friends even went out joyriding around town and bashing in mailboxes with a baseball bat. Local police caught them. We’ll come back to this later.
Despite the fact that Beans legitimately should have failed his Senior year again, the faculty caved to MTV’s pressure and gave him barely-passing marks. Beans walked last in the graduation ceremony so he would get an extra-big cheer. It was all dreadfully fake and cringe worthy.
A couple months after graduation, the episode aired. Beans, stupid stupid Beans, flat-out told the MTV camera that he had lied to the local police that night when he had been bashing in mailboxes.
After the episode aired, and his self-incrimination made national television, the police came back for him. I don’t know how it all ended (I moved on with my life and out of that town), but from the sound of things he was in deep trouble. He never stopped being an idiot. He never self-improved in any way. He never stopped being a dopey loser. And because of the legal ramifications, Season 2 Episode 4 of ‘Made’ never made it to reruns, to the best of my knowledge.”
How To Stop A Shooter
“My university has a faculty union. Around 10 years ago, they noticed the spike in university shootings and wanted to do something about it. At the time, all the buildings on campus had outside locks on their classrooms and each professor had a key. In an active shooter setting, professors would have to lock the door. That meant that they would have to step outside the classroom, find the key on their key ring, get it in the lock with their undoubtedly unsteady hands, and step back inside the classroom to close the door and block it.
This, of course, is extremely dangerous. It’s time consuming, puts the professor in immense amounts of danger, and by extension, puts the students in danger as well. If a shooter sees this, they can shoot the professor and stride in to massacre the students. The union decided that they wanted a solution: installation of simple lockable thumb turn deadbolts on the inside. That way, all they would have to do is close the door and turn the lock. No stepping into the path of a shooter, no fiddling with keys, nothing.
The union approached the higher-ups with this idea and they were declined on the basis of expense. They asked the next year; nope, too expensive. They asked the next year. And the next. And the next. Over a decade passed.
Finally, with the Parkland shooting earlier in the year, something had to be done. If a shooter comes into a classroom, what would be the best item to use to defend yourself? Well, ideally, a weapon, but the university has a no weapons policy. The next best thing? Something small, heavy, easy to aim and throw, and guaranteed to stun them. Something like a cue ball or…a hockey puck.
With the help of some local businesses, the union bought over 2,500 hockey pucks and distributed them across campus. Students were told to keep them in their backpacks and to use them as a last resort against a shooter. While news outlets quickly picked it up and assumed that they were serious about using them to defend against shooters, there was a deeper purpose to them. Each of them had a code on the back that would lead students to a donation page to purchase indoor locks.
It was seized within the day. Many outlets had articles about it, interviewing students, professors, campus police, etc., who all played along with their initial assumption. The message was clear: because they wouldn’t protect us, we had to take our defense into our own hands.
The best part? When she found out, the university president was in a meeting with other university presidents across the state. She had no idea that the union’s idea had been blocked for so long.”