What was THE INCIDENT at your secondary school?

[NoviceNewMN]

Inspired by a thread on another website that I randomly came across throught google.

Every school has some sort of 'infamous incident' that passed into the annals of school infamy and was the sole topic of gossip for months if not years.

What was yours?

Mine was the head teacher had an affair with another teacher. Both were married. It all became public on the last day of term and neither of them came back the following term. Just disappeared. No one talked about anything else for a long time.

Two boys got struck by lightening on the playing field during a storm. One of them tragically died.

The 6th formers bought fish and stuck it down the back of the radiators in the common room on the last day of term before summer. By September mixed with the hot weather the entire school absolutely stank and no-one could get to the bottom of it. Had to get the professionals in and everything. Ha ha ha

@nauticant

It was the boys who made a bomb then took it round to a teacher's house to blow him up. He wasn't there so they set it off anyway, it didn't do that much damage. The Police were involved but it was decided it would be best for the boys not to go through the criminal justice system but instead to remain at school to complete their education, although they were isolated from the other kids when not in class.

An appalling decision, the consideration should have been what's the best for the rest of the school, pupils and staff, not for these boys. Why are the innocents always at the bottom of the heap when decisions are made?

Bomb scare.

Barely made the news that night (you can guess where bomb scares are commonplace… I always said if this happened anywhere else in the UK it would be national news for days)

Bomb squad surrounding the school for hours. All of us contained in classrooms wondering wtf was going on. Teachers crying thinking we were going to die. Them not letting us out to go home/get out of the school (still confused by that). Whole thing went on until lunchtime when the device was made safe.

We also had a teacher sue the school for gender discrimination- she won. And a boy tried to sell weed from a locker, he also brought his mum’s sex toy into school in his bag… needless to say he was swiftly expelled.

Another big one is one girl who was the year above us would always cause trouble for one of my friends. A nude picture that the girl in the year above had sent to her boyfriend had got sent around. My friend and two other girls in our year got their hands on it, printed hundreds of copies in the IT room and stuck it all around the school🤦‍♀️ needless to say they got in so much trouble once CCTV showed them printing the pictures in school!

A girl in my year got pregnant aged 14 and was never seen at school again. Never knew whose the baby was

Two teachers had an affair and he left his wife, who was also a teacher there, for her. They used to hold hands around the campus which we all thought was gross.

A young PE teacher was asked to leave after only 2 terms and rumour had it that was because he was 'too friendly' with the 6th form girls. There is even a 'joky' picture in a year book I have of one of them feeling up his bum! It appears this photo was publishable in the late 80s

Teacher (I now realise was an alcoholic) would occasionally get pissed at lunchtime and smash his classroom up. He’d get a telling off, be good for a bit, do it again.

Temporary french teacher nicked a load of school money and went home to France with it.

Girl in the year above (maybe year 10) had an abortion so she was asked to leave (catholic school).

Some older boys drew a penis on the playground and were never caught.

@TacoTues

One of the teachers got arrested for having indecent photos of kids on his computer.

The whole school saw the police take him away. Then a letter went home to our parents.

Did he go into acting after that?

I heard of a similar incident in the 00s

Our RE teacher was notoriously ineffective and unable to control a class. Kids used to sneak vodka in and drink it at the back of the room, set waste paper bins on fire, etc. On a few occasions he attacked kids. Eventually he took “early retirement”.

What I later heard is that he was a monster at home, his children were also at the school and very quiet and anxious.

The geography teacher broke 4 fingers on a boy in my year. He had a habit of slamming a thick heavy textbook on the desk from above head height to get attention when the class were being disruptive, usually on the desk of whomever was annoying him the most. On this occasion he caught the boys fingers on the desk and crushed them. I remember there being much gossip about it, and speculation that the boy actually moved his hand under the book on its way down deliberately to try and get him sacked (and he's the sort of boy that would think that was a good idea!) But the teacher remained employed somehow!

2 sets of teachers having affairs ( I was a member of staff at time) .

And when I was in school a much older teachers
was apparently caught in stock cupboard with pupil (15).
A few years after I left, I did see them at a local pub together - Her about 18, him early 60s..

@SanDiegoSunshine

The 6th formers bought fish and stuck it down the back of the radiators in the common room on the last day of term before summer. By September mixed with the hot weather the entire school absolutely stank and no-one could get to the bottom of it. Had to get the professionals in and everything. Ha ha ha

Back in the 60s on our last day we put an advert in the local paper to sell the school, ordered taxis for the Head from every taxi company in town and some genius managed to rig the electric organ so that when the school song was being played there was a magnesium flash. A well known woman was interviewed in the papers decrying that young people didn't know the National Anthem, she was due to speak at our grand Speech Day, we prefects (with a bit of help from some staff) made copies of the NA, the first 3 verses and managed to distribute them. At the end when the NA was played we all mumbled our way through the first verse but then carried on sing loudly the next two verses. The Head was going purple trying to stop us but at the end the speaker stood up, smiled and applauded, telling the Head there must be no repercussions.

@NewlyGranny

Y11 boys running a prostitution ring pimping underage Y9 girls. Went on at lunchtimes in various on-campus locations; contraception was the cling film from their lunch boxes secured with elastic bands. The brains behind it was the Head Boy. "Clients" were charged $2.50 and the girls got 50¢. This was late '60s. The girls were what we would now call vulnerable and were probably groomed by the high profile older boys pretending to be their boyfriends. 🤬 All hushed up to protect boys' reputations as some had influential parents.

This is utterly horrific. Those poor girls

oh also, Me and 6 other took A Level PE, the new young teacher got us through the course work pretty quickly, only for us to be told by the head teacher- 6 weeks before end term, that the Teacher had given us the completely wrong coursework and had been sacked.
We were all given grade C as couldnt re-do the coursework in time

Teacher accused, charged and found guilty of bursting a boys eardrum and causing permanent damage by clipping him round the ear.
The truth was, the boy had a ball kicked at his head at break earlier in the day and told his parents that the teacher (he didn’t like) hit him.
Apparently all his friends knew the truth at the time and kept quiet.

Teacher had nudes on her laptop and let a pupil use the laptop, pupil downloaded them to a memory stick and made a MySpace profile with them

Also the time that someone discovered 'magic mushrooms' growing in a field nearby. News spread through the school and loads of people were picking them, drying them and selling them. Really stupid I now realise. I did try some but nothing much happened so maybe they weren't even the real thing. We had the police in when the teachers found out.

A packet of cocaine was found by a kid in the playground but luckily they handed it to a teacher!

Aside from the teachers shagging each other and the pupils. On one occasion two girls got into a racist argument. Mobile phones had just become a thing so both girls rang their parents. Both families turned up with bats, chains etc A police riot van had to come and drag everyone away.

On another occasion, a rumour was started that someone had come into the school with a gun. Many girls (all girls school) panicked and tried to run out of the gates and the deputy head was stood there trying to convince everyone to go back. It sounds far fetched but two girls from our school were actually sadly killed in a drive by shooting outside a nightclub. That’s probably the incident other people would think of although it didn’t happen at the school.

My brother’s primary school was closed by police as one of the kids fathers did something and went on the run. They thought he might try to make contact with or kidnap his kid. All the children had to sit in the church hall while police marksmen watched the school from the bell tower. He never showed up. My mum got interviewed by local news when that happened.

Under age athletics star (commonwealth games short list) got pregnant and BF ran away until her very rich Dad paid him to come back

A boy in my year tried to escape lessons and for some reason climbed over a fence (it was an open campus and he could have just walked out) Anyway it was a barbed fence and he got stuck the fire services had to come and cut him free and then take him to hospital. They had to hold him on the fence while they freed him as if he moved half an inch he would have gone through a key nerve apparently.

Two suicides in the space of less than a year. Both were 15 year old children. One jumped off a bridge over the dual carriageway. The other walked out of school during the day and threw himself off a tower block nearby. Both were being bullied at a school their parents were paying thousands of pounds a term to send them to.

Awful.

A 16-year-old girl at the school married a man in his 80s. It was in the national news.

One student upended a cup of hot chocolate over another. A 14 year old girl got pregnant which at the time (over 30 years ago) was pretty scandalous.

Some kids got a big chain and padlock and chained up the doors to the staff room so loads of staff were trapped inside.

A boy was held upside down by the ankles out of the window by two other boys, three storeys up. They were caught and slippered.

There was a relationship between an art teacher and sixth former, they married after she left.

Some teen pregnancies.