School is out, but the Algonquin school newspaper is still online. An article from last week on senior pranks offered a historic look at senior pranks and the banned Senior March.
According to the post, some seniors did protest the senior march prohibition to no avail.
“Honestly, our first March that we ever had here was the best thing, a wonderful thing,” Assistant Principal Mel Laughton said. “The kids came in and came through the building very respectfully, celebrated their forthcoming graduation, and it was a wonderful thing. But every class thereafter decided to add their own mix to it, and it ended up being very dangerous, scaring people, that sort of thing; thus, we had to get rid of it.”
The story also revealed some information about pranks thwarted by the administration this year. (Plus one harmlessly fun one that did succeed.)
According to [Principal Tom]Mead, a group of seniors put up a “defaming” poster outside the building at the Lower School parking lot, which was taken down before students arrived at the school in the morning. Mead declined to reveal the poster’s contents, but suggested crude, immature ideas.
“There are some [pranks] that I just really don’t want to talk about,” Laughton said.
A selection of pranks posed a physical threat to members of the school community. This year, mimicking a 2014 prank, seniors attached a trash barrel precariously to the top of a stairwell.
“It’s not fair to do something that can make people fearful and it’s not okay to do something such as tie a barrel over a stairway, which has the potential of falling and hitting someone in the head, which it has done in the past,” Laughton said. “Although, the barrel did not fall this year. Two or three years ago, a barrel fell and hit a girl on the head; she had to be sent to the nurse, had a concussion.”. . .
Laughton said. “I don’t know if you know, but there were a couple people who wrapped my car in saran wrap this year. That was outrageous! That was funny, funny, funny!”
You can read the full story, here.
An earlier Harbinger story also shared one way that seniors were creating their own fun outside of school: A Senior Assassin game pitted the class against each other with squirt guns and kill lists. Seniors stalked their targets. Examples given included pouncing out of bushes and waiting outside workplaces.
Each person involved is given a new target each week that they need to “assassinate” outside of school property by squirting them with water. Once you make a successful kill, you must tweet a picture of the crime scene and then take on your next mark- whomever your victim had to kill is now your target.
The masterminds behind this game, seniors Sara Travis and Parker Lescalleet, had been planning since mid-April, in hopes of making the seniors’ last few weeks memorable.
“Steering wanted something to make up for everything that seniors got taken away,” Travis said. “Having a fun activity that we get to handle ourselves gets people’s minds off of what we aren’t allowed to do.”
You can read that story here.