Those of you who were fortunate enough to attend a high school with white, rural, male students will be unsurprised to learn that white, rural, male high school students are wasted. So, so wasted.
Some advice: If you decide to spike your high school cafeteria's stash of marinara with hot sauce, make sure the hot sauce isn't the same strength as US law-enforcement-grade pepper spray. Unfortunately for the cafeteria staff at Chicago's Highland Park High School, that's just what one student decided to do during an ill-fated prank last month.
If you work at a high school as a teacher or principal and have a mug shot floating around somewhere online, it's probably safe to assume it will surface at some point. In keeping with basic rules of the internet, the proper reaction would then be to ignore its surfacing, instead of over-reacting and trying to squash it. Unfortunately for all involved, the principal at Riverdale High School in Clayton County Georgia did the exact opposite earlier this week and suspended a student who posted her mug shot to Instagram.
When police officers first became a common fixture in high schools in the 1990s, school districts presumably had expectations that the law enforcement would protect students from violence. Instead, the police have found themselves mired in problems usually reserved for a constantly exasperated Vice Principal: disciplining trouble-makers, chasing after scofflaws, scolding ruffians, and tracking down truants. As a result, the number of kids sent to court has increased in school districts where police are present at schools. A criminologist at the University of Maryland and expert in school violence, Denise Gottfredson, said:
A high school student thought he was so smart when he took to his Twitter account to slam his teacher for allegedly pulling the ol' switcheroo on test day.
A rape case in Steubenville, Ohio, involving some members of the city's beloved football team has drawn national attention. The Times said that it was a notable case because it was "a sexual assault accusation in the age of social media, when teenagers are capturing much of their lives on their camera phones ... and then posting it on the Web, like a graphic, public diary." There were some images of the crime uploaded to Twitter and Instagram that show the unconscious girl being carried around.
After a recent program revealed that five percent of the city's high schoolers tested positive for STDs, including HIV, Philadelphia is installing free condom dispensers in nearly a third of its high schools. The 22 schools chosen were the ones with the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases.
Thanksgiving is crashing down all around us, which means high school reunions are in season.
Yesterday, Gawker received an impassioned email from a Mt. Lebanon (Pa.) High student concerning the school's proposed "grinding" ban. (If you are not sure what "grinding" is, you'll find out in detail shortly.) The letter was so convincing that we asked to republish it in full, and the student complied, so long as they remain anonymous, lest the school administration attempt to suppress Mt. Lebanon's one true Grinder Crusader. We salute the student's important cause.
In Kountze, Texas, high school cheerleaders had a habit of writing Bible verses on banners for school football games. The superintendent, cognizant of our pesky "separation of church and state," ordered them to stop. A district judge disagreed, and has (temporarily) allowed the Bible banners to continue, throwing editorial writers across America into a tizzy over the various abuses of law and the American way by one of the world's easiest targets: insular middle American Christians.
According to a police report, a student at Charlotte's Independence High School spiked a teacher's coffee with a "butt-enhancing drug." Ellen Vick, a technical education teacher at the school, reported the incident Monday of last week. School investigators then discovered a package of GluteBoost, which contained three empty capsules and a full one, although it's not exactly clear where the package was found.
Mason, Ohio is just a typical Middle American town. Home to the Golf Center at Kings Island. Hell, Money magazine named it the 24th Best Place to Live in America, 2011. A fine place to raise a family. Or so we thought. Because even Mason, Ohio has found its public schoolhouses infested with what you've always feared: marijuana.
Despite the fact that college education in America is a years-long exercise in dodging crippling debt and financial exploitation with uncertain payoffs, it goes without saying that having a college degree is still preferable to only having a high school diploma, all things being equal. Because while indebted college graduates may be screwed at the moment, at least they get to cut ahead in line when the jobs come around.
