People Are Sharing The Biggest Scandal From Their High School That Still Lives Rent-Free In Their Minds
Everyone remembers at least one scandal that occurred during their high school years. The degree of said incident can range in seriousness, but sometimes a scandal is just so wild, it sticks in a person’s mind WAY after graduation…
That’s why when Redditor u/Deeznaps asked, “What scandal from high school still lives rent free in your mind?” thousands of people flooded the comment section with the high school scandals they’ll NEVER forget. Without further ado, here are 18 of their most shocking stories:
If your high school had a scandal you’ll never forget, feel free to tell us about it using this anonymous form!
1.“On the last day of school in 1997, my high school civics teacher went inside the school building and was never seen again. There is footage of him walking into the building from the teachers’ parking lot, but he does not appear on the video footage from the inside of that very entrance — it’s like he literally disappeared while entering the building.”
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“He was also my junior and senior year homeroom teacher, and everyone thought it was super weird that he wasn’t in the classroom that day because he always got there extra early. Since I knew we had to have attendance submitted to the office or we would all be counted absent, I went down the hall and told one of the other teachers so he could take our attendance.
Ultimately, he was never seen or heard from again. The police conducted a huge investigation, and I heard (but I don’t know for sure) that the FBI got involved. As far as I know, he didn’t have any skeletons in his closet, not even a parking ticket, no enemies, no particular reason to disappear. He just suddenly stopped existing, best anyone could tell.”
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2.“My high school had an awesome computer club, especially considering it was the ’90s, but it was hard to get into…I know because I tried constantly with no luck.”
“In my senior year, the teacher in charge of it and some students were arrested for counterfeiting money. The older I get, the more I can’t understand why an adult would team up with teenagers to do such a thing.”
3.“We had an assistant principal whom everyone disliked and spread rumors about. It turned out that his estranged father was John Jamelske, was one of the most prolific serial killers ever caught.”
“This all came to light, directly followed by a near career-ending scandal, when a student found an article about his dad’s arrest in 2003, printed out hundreds of copies, and redecorated all the hallways of the school with them.”
4.“We had an undercover cop at school who arrested a kid for selling drugs. When asked who his supplier was, he named several of the ‘cool’ teachers whom everyone liked. They were suspended pending investigation, but nothing came of it except that the entire school walked out and had a gigantic picket line that ended up on the news.”
“Years later, I learned from a guy who had been on the football team that it was actually true. The teachers had been getting drugs for kids for spring break trips and did the drugs along with them.”
5.“I was the scandal: Every day at school, a notice would be read, ‘Please return the screws from the desks, you will not get in trouble, leave them at the office.’ It was me. I was unscrewing and stealing all the desk screws.”
“I had a pencil case full of screws…and no desk lid was attached solidly to a desk.
It was my way of acting out because other bad stuff was going on in my life.”
6.“In high school, we got new laptop carts, which were basically carts on wheels to hold laptops and a printer that you could roll around to different classrooms. One time, who I thought was a teacher in another room, printed her emails on the cart printer by mistake. I picked them up thinking it was my paper. They were NOT.”
“It was six pages of spicy emails between the teacher and principal, who were both married and not to each other! They were NASTY.
I originally thought it was the teacher who printed them, but I found out later it was a kid in her class snooping on her computer when she left the room. He was trying to print them so he could show everyone.”
7.“The day of the bloody doorknobs: One random day the bell rang and we all poured into the hallways like normal, but it became quickly apparent that nothing was normal…”
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“Someone had taped used maxi pads to every single doorknob — at least 50 used pads covering every conceivable entry point. There were so many that you could actually smell them.
Needless to say, this sent the crowd of teenagers into a frenzy. Our teachers had a hell of a time reigning us in while also being unwilling to touch the pads. After what seemed like forever (probably less than three minutes), a janitor appeared wearing gloves and pushing a trash cart. He unceremoniously went door by door, yanking the pads off the handles, spritzing them with some spray, and half-heartedly wiping them before moving down the hall to the next door, and acting like it was just a normal day.
The mystery naturally spread like wildfire. This was 1995, so the school didn’t have security cameras yet, and as far as I’m aware, the culprit was never discovered, never claimed responsibility, or made any mention of a ‘message’ or such. Speculation raged, with everything from a student protest or a cry for attention to a kid playing a prank.
The amount of pads used required a good bit of ‘saving up’ to prepare. We all figured if it was some sort of feminist statement and that the culprit would eventually release some sort of manifesto or other ‘here’s why that happened’ type deal…but silence was all that followed.”
8.“A girl in high school faked cancer for three years. She’d shave her head in the bathroom and have people push her to class in a wheelchair (me included). She skipped over half the school year for two years because of ‘appointments.’ She was voted Prom Queen and even had a fundraiser held in her honor, which raised $10k towards medical bills.”
“She was only caught because her fake doctors’ notes listed her primary care physician as ‘Gary Sinise.'”
9.“There was a kid in my grade who was a super popular jock. During gym class one day, he decided to moon a group of popular girls. He turned around, pulled down his shorts, and simultaneously sh*t himself. The best part was that he was a total a-hole.”
“He definitely didn’t mean to poop, but when he bent over and spread his cheeks, it kind of just fell out.”
10.“‘The great scavenger hunt:’ A few friends put together a series of tasks that had point values and distributed them. A few of the ‘tasks’ were dangerous, gross, painful, etc. Somehow, two entire grades of kids were competing before long.”
“There was dumb stuff like eating a fly or licking a urinal, flicking the bully on the nose, getting a teacher to say f*ck (or other bad words worth fewer points), leaping down the entire stairwell to the bottom, faking a seizure during class, etc.
Eventually, a teacher found the list of challenges (there were a ton of copies), and it became a huge issue. They held an assembly for everyone in two separate grades and tried to find out who started the game. They offered rewards for kids who came forward and accused the usual suspects, but nobody said a word, so nobody was punished.
The game was remembered fondly and brought a lot of kids who previously weren’t friends closer together, despite causing some injuries and embarrassment.”
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11.“I went to an atypical high school located within a much larger athletic/office building/compound run by a large legacy company. The compound had a cafe and bar within it, and ran many different events that it catered food and drinks for, so it was licensed to serve alcohol.”
“In eleventh grade, a couple of kids in my grade figured out where the compound stored all their alcohol and managed to steal A LOT of alcohol. They probably could’ve gotten away with it, but they bragged so much about their accomplishment that eventually the teachers caught wind and reported it to the larger company.
Bizarrely, I don’t remember them actually getting in that much trouble. I think the school and company went the scare-tactics route of ‘if we wanted to charge you with theft, which we very well could, you would be in a WHOLE lot of trouble, so just don’t do it again.’ This stunt became a local legend at the school and is still talked about seven years after we graduated. Suffice to say, the company has majorly stepped up how they secure their alcohol.”
12.“AP class in high school: We were told very, very clearly that any cheating would result in a zero on tests/work. Come to find out, everyone but me and one other person (bottom rung people) cheated on one of the big tests. Huge fallout as the rest of the class would all fail, and it would affect their grades.”
“Cue enraged parents asking for a retest and no fail as it ‘wasn’t fair’ to these students, as some would lose their place in the honor society/possibly affect future schooling/valedictorian, etc., and made such a fuss that they were granted a retest.”
13.“I went to a private, all-boys, college-prep high school in the 80s. Tuition was very expensive, and you had to take an entrance exam to be admitted, so mostly high-achieving kids went there. Most of the guys were from wealthy families, but some of us just had parents who sacrificed a lot for us to go there. Anyway, they had a tradition of senior prank day that happened about a month prior to graduation. Not all seniors participated, but nearly all of the most popular (meaning rich and spoiled) guys did.”
©Buena Vista Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection
“The year I graduated, the pranks escalated to a point where the seniors cost the school thousands in damages — things like removing all of the desks from classrooms and putting them on the gym floor, essentially destroying it, and super-gluing all the antique classroom door locks, which wasn’t a cheap fix. I wasn’t there, but a friend of mine was. There were other things, but those stuck out when he told me about it. After that, the school denied diplomas to all of the guys who participated.
Later, I heard that a few were able to get the school to reverse that decision. All of a sudden, there was a brand new gymnasium building with remote control bleachers, central air, heated floors, and a slew of other bells and whistles built over the summer. It was named after one of the richest families in the school. All the other regular guys had to redo senior year for full tuition and work for the school after hours the whole year.
It seems there are no consequences if you’re rich. The guys who got out of it were the most entitled a-holes in the school to begin with, and they needed the lesson more than anyone. The injustice of the whole thing makes me sick to this day.”
14.“There was a party at one of the teachers’ houses out in the country. The teacher’s daughter was a senior at the time. A coach found out about it, told his players that he had a list of everyone who was there, and asked everyone to raise their hands if they were there. Most of the team raised their hands, so he felt a moral obligation to report it.”
“It spilled over into the other sports, and multiple games and track meets were canceled because there weren’t enough players remaining to have the games.
The teacher who hosted the party claimed that she didn’t know it was happening. Like, ma’am, there was music blaring from your barn, more than forty cars on your front lawn most of the night, and a handful still there the next morning because people slept in them instead of driving home. She was completely full of sh*t but didn’t receive any form of punishment. She was terrible to begin with, but a lot of people hated her afterwards because the kids were told they had to own up to their mistakes, but she got off scot-free.”
15.“My senior year (’98), a large amount of money went missing from a rally fundraiser at the school. Due to the circumstances of how it happened, one of the janitors was accused and nearly lost their job over it. That’s when the class president admitted to stealing the money because he felt guilty about the janitor losing their job over it.”
“Apparently, the president thought he could just pocket the money and people would let it be, but because it was a couple of thousand dollars, it wasn’t going to get swept under the rug. The janitor kept their job, the class president got suspended for a period of time, obviously got removed from the student body, and was shunned by a lot of people.
The sad part is that he was actually a likable guy across the student body. To this day, I don’t know what he was thinking. He never left the town and now runs his own audio/video marketing business, and by all means, still seems to be that likable guy.”
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16.“Our school charged $100 for a parking pass for the year. The parking pass was just a sticker with the school’s logo and ‘parking pass’ written underneath it. A friend and I made one in Photoshop and went to Staples and printed off a ton of them for like $20. (Between the two of us, we made probably around $2,000-3,000.) We then sold them to people for $25. The school was obviously confused when there were 200 cars, yet they’d only sold a few dozen passes.”
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“Someone ended up snitching, and my friend and I were both pulled into the office with a cop and the school staff, saying we owed the school all the money we’d made and needed to provide a list of everyone we’d sold them to. We just played dumb and pretended we had no clue what they were talking about, but we stopped selling them. That was the last we heard about it.
Next year, passes were numbered, and when students bought one, they were assigned a number, so it put an end to the whole thing.”
17.“1999: I was a senior at a Catholic high school in Virginia. We had a new freshman enrolled who claimed to be Stephen Spielberg’s nephew, ‘Jonathan Spielberg.’ He attended the school for a semester or two in order to ‘conduct research for a film role,’ ingratiating himself with the other ninth graders.”
“He received free tuition and special privileges from the principal, who was frequently seen walking through the halls with his arm across Jonathan’s shoulders. The principal, who was a priest and former Navy Reserve chaplain, even gave up his own parking space so Jonathan could park his BMW with his ‘Splberg’ plates in the spot.
Eventually, Jonathan stopped coming, and concerned administrators dug deeper into his file to contact him, his family, or his previous schools.
Turns out, there was no Jonathan Spielberg. All the enrollment documents and transcripts were fake. He was actually a 28-year-old who lived locally with his mother in a small apartment.
From memory, I think he was charged with fraud but given a suspended sentence and served no time. The principal, who was always an angry and mean man, was recused from his position at the end of the year when the Catholic order of priests he belonged to withdrew from the school, and he got promoted by the Navy.”
18.“I went to an all-girls Catholic school, and my class only had 68 people in it. EXACTLY 34 of them were ‘popular girls.’ Preppy, sporty, rich (or at least into the rich aesthetic) girls who carried Coach bags and wore Uggs and makeup every day, etc. (This was the late 2000s).”
©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection
“The OTHER half were ‘weirdos’ — nerds, theater kids, band geeks, art students, fandom people, those on scholarships, etc.
In our senior year, as the school was preparing for prom, the popular girls decided they didn’t want the same kind of prom the school had been doing for decades. Basically, our school had been renting the same old school restaurant function hall for as long as anyone could remember, and, since it was a Catholic school, there was a dress code (dresses had to pass the fingertip rule), no grinding was allowed, and there were a few teachers there as chaperones. This was considered distinctly uncool, so the popular girls lobbied to have the venue and rules changed. They wanted: a different venue, lights turned off for dancing, no dress code, no chaperones, and no ‘clean’ music rules. The school refused.
In retaliation, the popular girls decided to throw their own ANTI-PROM at a large local hotel. They didn’t invite anyone from the other half of the class. In the end, I think they conceded to having one or two parents act as chaperones, but they stayed out of the way/in a different area from where the anti-prom was happening.
Because the school wasn’t selling enough tickets to the ‘real’ prom, they almost had to cancel it. The weirdo half of the class was really sad and, in the end, I think some alumnae chipped in to make it happen.”
Did any of these stories surprise you? Did your high school have any scandals that still stick in your mind? Tell us in the comments or answer anonymously using the form below!
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
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