Every school has its share of unsavory incidences that send rumors running ramped through the halls. Usually, it's pretty tame stuff, but for some, it's a bit more dramatic. The people in the following stories describe the big scandal that rocked their school and what it was like to be a part of it.
(Content has been edited for clarity.)
An Innocent Dare Turns Deadly

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“A kid got dared to eat a McChicken in two bites while on the bus home. He choked on it and fell unconscious. The bus driver stopped the bus and was able to clear passageway and do CPR. The kid was in a coma for a few months and came back to school with severe brain damage and had to be in a wheelchair.
They elected him homecoming king.”
One Thing After The Other With This School

“My school had a couple of incidents: Someone, who still hasn’t been found yet, smeared poop all throughout the boy’s bathroom. It was closed for the rest of the year and half of the next year after. We called him the poop bandit, and he was featured in the school newspaper. They also found a severed squirrel head in the sink of the band bathroom.
Just this year they had a kid kill himself, leaving a note naming names of those who lead him to do it. One girl was named, and she found out and killed herself. Another tried to kill himself but failed.
We had a bomb threat on my senior year prom assembly and had hordes of swat in the school and on top of the building. My principal got fired because he had adult magazines and inappropriate pictures of the cheerleading team in his desk.”
The List

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“This all happened about three weeks ago. There was this kid that was less than liked. Some girl who found pleasure in bullying him decided to walk around behind him saying he’s going shoot up the school, loud enough for him to hear. After a little while, he turned around and shot back, ‘Maybe I will.’
A day later a list of names with the label ‘Kill list’ was found next to the boy’s locker, with a whole bunch of names including the girl who was bullying him. The girl saw it and called her mother to take her home. Her mother posted on Facebook that the kids were in danger and should be pulled from school. The school was small, like 400 kids, but half were pulled. The school posted that there is no threat, but this was untrue. The boy was being investigated by the police, and he was found innocent. Not long after, like a day after that entire incident went down, someone tipped off the police of another suspicious person. His house was investigated, and a few weapons and another identical kill list were found. The guy who was going to shoot up the school framed the one getting bullied. The girl is getting misdemeanor charges for disrupting the peace, and we haven’t heard about the guy who had malicious intent, just that he’s in jail now.”
Someone Should Close This School Down!

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“I come from a small school. Everyone knows everybody kind of thing. Overall there were maybe 200 students. My graduating class only had 25 students.
There were several car accidents. Some because of impaired driving, some because of another impaired driver. Then there were the few who were just going too fast.
As well, the wood shop teacher lost his thumb.
There were also at least three teacher/student affairs.
Another high school teacher was frequenting parties and giving students adult beverages, which resulted in one of those previously mentioned car accidents.
Some other students did it in a secluded bathroom during lunch, and the dude ran off with the girl’s lacy red thong. He hung it on an exit sign. It lived there for a few days. She was too short to even think about getting them herself. She finally asked a janitor to get them when she realized none of the authority figures had noticed and done anything.
This other kid was beaten to a bloody pulp for being gay and then thrown in the dumpster after he was unconscious. I don’t know how he was found or the extent of his injuries. I do know he was out of school for nearly a whole semester and he had broken ribs. I never saw him hang out with anyone except these three girls. They had scooped him up and protected him. They didn’t allow much to mill about and were absolute pit bulls. I’m just glad he found friends/a support system.
There was a guy who people constantly dared to eat things off the ground and floor. Anything they could find really. The sad thing is, he suffered from seizures. I knew him when I was like 6 years old, so I thought eating the gross things caused it. I finally saw him have a seizure. It’s scary and bums a person out. I wound up alone with him when he started to seize. That’s a different story. He stopped showing up randomly one year.
I can no longer remember the prank but, it was aimed at a group of teachers the class didn’t like. I do recall that the prank backfired yet still had the desired effect the students wanted. However, it also meant senior pranks were strictly banned.
There were also known thieves who knew how to break into locked lockers. Gym lockers, regular lockers, didn’t matter. I had $10 hidden in a pair of panties once, and I came back with my panties splayed out and my money missing. Like who wants to touch another person’s undies?
Another girl got permanently suspended when she aimed and fired a fake weapon at a substitute she didn’t like.
As well, a handful of kids have traversed the halls who didn’t hesitate to punch teachers in the face.
They found out a younger student wasn’t mentally well when she started her period, and she ended up covering the bathroom in the blood. I guess there was a lot of it and nearly every square inch was covered. Guess she’d do it again later but, with poop.
This one kid was dragged out of a classroom by the principal, three teachers, and two police officers.
Every other week (sometimes every) cops/dogs would sweep our parking lot and building. If the dog(s) were there, we had to stay in the classrooms so as not to distract them.”
Talk About A Harsh Critic

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“A group of three or four students had gathered together information on how to build an explosive to apparently, ‘blow up a street sign’ or similar honestly just for fun and giggles. They built it, brought it to school, and stored it in some innocent’s locker with a new lock. She can’t open their locker, it gets opened, ‘what’s this box?’ and suddenly the school’s on lockdown for a couple of hours. Then we get evacuated with no word as to why. I was in gym class, so sweatpants and t-shirt and shoes and socks and nothing else – so go home thanks. I even had to explain why I didn’t have my homework done the next day. ‘Sorry, my backpack and pants and books were in my GYM LOCKER ALL NIGHT because of the BOMB THREAT that happened ALL YESTERDAY. Don’t you remember? It was in the news; you might have heard on your free day off in the middle of the freaking week.’ The actual students directly involved were cool people.
We also had crazy hyper-political correctness. A well-loved music-oriented teacher (choral director) who put on the annual school musical for years wanted to put on ‘West Side Story’ in 1999; all good. No problem until an uproar was created over racism against Puerto Ricans. The school canceled the musical. An outside, independent theater group took up the market opportunity and came in to put on ‘West Side Story’ all on their own while the high school scrambled to put on almost any other musical available on the planet that was politically correct and fast. They may have ended up with ‘Guys & Dolls’ now that I recall. The situation made TV news; it made the papers, it made a PBS special with the main complainants on camera. The teacher resigned and moved back to his homeland (Trinidad). Yes, the teacher felt the whole thing was so bad he had to not only quit his job of many years but outright left America and ‘go home.'”
Just A Kid Who Really Likes Chemical Reactions

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“My freshman year of high school in 2003/2004, my old neighbor/best childhood friend, who was a junior, decided that he was going to steal some chlorine from the school’s pool where he did life-guarding for the swim gym class.
He was doing this weeks leading up to the incident by mixing isopropyl and chlorine in a one-liter soda bottle, shaking it and throwing it into the street only to watch the bottle swell, and explode. Shooting it into the air, or flying down the street with the gases following after it.
He would sneak into my parents’ backyard into the cabana and steal our chlorine powder, which we had locked up and he figured out the combo lock. My folks were not pleased.
Anyway, it was about an hour after lunch or sixth period if you will. He only made this little gas bomb in the next hallway from my class. You heard this loud BOOM, and the smell hit instantly. The school was evacuated, and police, ambulances, and the fire department showed up. We sat outside on the football field the rest of the day and they had to air out the school. We went back inside to get our things and make our way to the buses home.
He thought he got away with it for a week or two. Every day over the PA system they’d ask ‘If anyone has any information about the evacuation, please call crime stoppers at (number) and you will be given a reward of $1,000.’
I contemplated ratting him out for that money, but I have known him since I could walk. The school figured out who did it eventually and he got expelled for the rest of the year.
I mean this kid was a troublemaker in the first place. Doing illegal substances on the back of the school bus, sneaking into peoples pools at night or when they were on vacation even if the pools were covered up, stealing, etc.
He’s turned his life around from the last time we talked, but I haven’t seen him in 14 years.”
You Just Can’t Trust Anyone Anymore

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“So there was a huge dealer at my school. Everyone bought from him. He was good friends with the second biggest dealer at the school. They went on a trip together to a city in another state and for some reason, the second biggest dealer left the other guy in that city without any money or his phone. The guy had to hitchhike back home. Once he got home, he bought a weapon and broke into the second dealer’s house and threatened him and his family. No one got hurt but the police were called, and they raided the first dealer’s house. They found a ton of illegal substances and paraphernalia, so they arrested him. Somehow a few weeks later he walked at graduation. Not sure how they let him do that.”
A Life Taken, A Life Forfeited

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“At my old high school, a recently-graduated student suffered third-degree burns on over 70 percent of his body after a gas can exploded while he was burning brush. His girlfriend was a senior at the time. His face was spared, but he was touch-and-go. The doctors said he’d most likely need both legs and one arm amputated, and then his kidneys failed. His parents pulled the plug about five days after the incident. His girlfriend didn’t seem to care much, but that’s a different story.
At my new school, we had a senior jump off an overpass after he didn’t get accepted into MIT. This is a much smaller school (100 kids per graduating class), and it tore people apart. I didn’t know him well, but he was brilliant and incredibly kind.
On a lighter note, somebody released ladybugs into the boys’ bathroom at my old school. It would’ve been funnier had they released them in the vents, but they just dumped the ladybugs out of the box and into a clump. Animal Control came and just… scooped them up. Pretty anticlimactic.
And we had four bomb threats last year at my old high school, too. I’m glad to be gone.”
Not So Beloved Anymore

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“This year, my beloved and favorite teacher was caught taking pictures of boys in a JC Penny’s restroom, and when the police searched him, they found hundreds of pictures of boys in our school restroom. I was very distraught, to say the least.”
Something’s Not Right Here

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“A kid ran out onto the road and was run over by a teacher driving a car with the tennis team in it. She died while being taken to the hospital. The worst thing is that her father was posting on Facebook what was going on at the time, while his child was dying. He accused the teacher of murdering his child even though the teacher didn’t do anything wrong as his child ran out onto the road without looking, the teacher couldn’t stop the car in time. The teacher went on to become our head of year in our last year of school. He was a good teacher and didn’t deserve to go through what he did.
The new headteacher took both common rooms and the library away from the sixth form (16-to-18-year-olds) as we should have spent the time studying instead. She gave the library to younger years so we couldn’t use that. She then complained that the sixth form was too disruptive and didn’t have anywhere to go.
Said headteacher gave the younger students new iPads for free. Older years got nothing.
In most of my A-Level exams (exams you take when you’re 18), the fire alarm went off within a few minutes of the exam starting. We read the question, the fire alarm goes off, and we wait outside for an hour thinking about what we’re going to write in our essay. We go back in and still have nearly all the time left. Free planning time.
Said headteacher made everyone take a forth, compulsory A Level subject, the baccalaureate. Think of it as a university-level essay question, but you spend 70% of the essay writing about how the essay improved you as a person. It was a joke of a subject, and I got an abysmal mark because no one told me that I had to do self-improvement work, so I just wrote a long essay on a topic I chose. I went through six different teachers throughout the two years, five of them who didn’t even teach the subject, and all the others struggling to teach a subject they didn’t know. The one who knew what to teach mysteriously disappeared one day. At the end of my final year, I asked my history (and baccalaureate) teacher what happened to her, and he said he couldn’t tell me. No idea what happened there but it was a mess all around. “
A Battle For The History Books

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“In England, you don’t get much violence in schools aside from the rubbish ‘fights’ that sometimes break out, so this was a shock one for us.
We had one day left before half-term, but the next school over had already finished for the week. We hated each other for some reason; it was a weird school rivalry. They just charged onto our school field over lunchtime with knives and stuff and started grabbing people and threatening them. A bunch of seventh graders got sent home because they were scared and it was only the first term of the school year.
We also had a woman stabbed to death at the end of the bridle path along our school field with the guy who killed her is still on the loose. Lots of crime scene folks and news presenters having to deal with a bunch of teenagers asking dumb questions that day.
It was a good school though I swear.”
Where Are All These Knives Coming From?!

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“We had three incidents, although one was probably more serious than the others.
There was a stabbing in the girl’s bathroom. Two eighth grade girls were in an argument about a boy they liked and decided to meet in the girl’s bathroom before school. Things escalated, and one of them was stabbed in the shoulder with a pocket knife. I was told it wasn’t serious (I wasn’t there as I was on a field trip with the rest of the seventh graders)
A boy in my 8th-grade year got expelled for trying to stab another boy with scissors. The attempted stabber already had multiple infractions, so the school took the opportunity just to get rid of him. He goes to the school I’m in now.
Besides that, when I was in sixth grade, we had to move locations because chemicals from the paint factory across the street had seeped into the groundwater beneath the school and had contaminated the building. There was evidence that it had given former students cancer and other health issues. The school system had known since the 90s and just ‘forgot’ to let everyone know.”
Standing Up For What Is Right!

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“My Catholic all girl’s high school wouldn’t allow girls to take girls to prom, so one girl decided to start a petition, and it ended up going viral. The next thing we knew there were news trucks trying to conduct interviews, however, the head nun told us we’d get expelled if any of us talked to them. As soon as the commotion died down, it was swept under the rug and never spoken of again.”
From One Extreme To The Other

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“I was a high school sophomore when Columbine happened, and I live in Colorado. The aura around the school was similar to the way it is now after the recent shooting. There was a lot of paranoia, a lot of nerves.
About two weeks after the shooting, the fire alarm in the school goes off. We all head outside for a typical fire drill. As most of you know most typical fire drills are over within maybe 15 minutes and you go back inside. After about 45 minutes we are all still stuck outside with no idea what’s going on. Cops had shown up. The fire department had shown up. So we thought maybe there was a real fire. After about an hour we start getting word that there was a bomb threat called in. After about an hour and 45 minutes, the announcement is made that we are all being sent home. School is canceled for the rest of the day so they can see if they can find the bomb if there is one, and just generally to keep us safe.
At the end of the day, after having not found the bomb, it’s apparent that this was a hoax; an investigation ensues. During the investigation, they discover that a kid in my grade didn’t want to go back to school from lunch. So at the Taco Bell in our town, yes the only one, he used the pay phone outside to call in a bomb threat. It wasn’t hard for them to figure out who it was. But here’s the kicker. It was close to the end of the year, and a lot of special things were happening in that time frame. One of which included the Colorado Supreme Court justices being on tour going to some of the high schools in the state. The day of the bomb threat just happened to be our day. Not only that but ours was special, and I can’t remember what was going on but not only were the Colorado Supreme Court justices there but pretty much every district attorney from the state of Colorado as well. Let’s just say a slap on the wrist is not what he got.
That was almost 20 years ago. So now I’m a father, and I have four kids. Once again another horrible school shooting happens (Florida), and the air is rife with paranoia and anxiety. So my wife and I get a call from my step daughter’s stepmother that there’s been a threat called in and her father and stepmother wanted to pick up our stepdaughter from school and bring her to us. Because of this we went and got our other kids as well. The only thing we could find out was that a rumor had been called in of a possible shooting threat that closed one school, put another on lockdown and put our school on high alert.
Once again an investigation ensued because it turns out this was another hoax. A substitute secretary or something like that was apparently really nervous about the fact that she had never had training on what to do during a school shooting. So her response to this was to fake a call threatening to ‘Kill Them All.’ Needless to say, she was busted almost immediately, and we’re still dealing with the aftermath of the situation.”
Everyone Loves English

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“In junior high, a bunch of us snuck into the principal’s office and stuck dirty pads onto everything possible. (We used food dye to make them look used)
My sophomore year an English teacher and student’s inappropriate relationship was discovered. He was fired. A letter was sent out to everyone, and I still have it on Facebook somewhere. My junior year a different English teacher was fired for the same thing. The last male English teacher stopped allowing students to hang out in his classroom during off periods and before/after school for fear of being wrongly accused of anything. Later that year a substitute teacher was found pleasuring themselves on a science lab table using one of those extendable water hose things for when you get dangerous substances on you and need to wash off.
One of my friends found a band teacher on Grindr and messaged him; the guy apparently had no issue with the fact that my friend was still a student at the same school. No surprise there.
My senior year a band student attacked the band director with a music stand. That one was unfortunate for me. He was a good director and loved his job.”