There’s a reason so many teen dramas are set in high schools: schools are a breeding ground for drama. Everyone’s got a few good stories of the biggest scandals that happened back when they were at school – be it the time two teachers supposedly had an affair or when a student rigged the school council elections.
School drama is so much more salacious than standard tabloid gossip as it’s so intensely personal and much more real. It’s hard to relate to with a $2.1 billion divorce – hearing about how the clever kid actually cheated on all of his exams is far more entertaining.
Here are Reddit’s best stories of juicy school scandals.
1. Phone theft
One year on exams day, they tried to add a new method to prevent cheating where a man from the administration comes to every class before every exam and collects students’ phones. He put a sticker with a number on each phone and gave the same sticker to the student so they could get their phone after school.
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This was working at first and “preventing cheating,” until one day some guy snuck into our high school and pretended to be the man there to collect the phones. He stole the whole high school’s phones and went.
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2. Can’t ban hugs
My middle school banned hugging and hand-holding during course changes because it blocked the hall.
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In protest all the eighth graders stood up and hugged each other during their lunch period. A bunch of students got detention. Made the cover of the Charlotte Observer.
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3. A little inappropriate
The 30ish theater teacher ran off with a recent grad. I was kind of pals with the student during a play the spring before the scandal, and she hosted the cast party where in retrospect, they seemed a little cosier than appropriate.
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As much as I’m dying for the inside scoop, I can’t imagine friending her on social media and asking “So what was up with you and Mr. ___________?”
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4. Chemistry experiment gone wrong
Kid made a chlorine bomb and threw it in the trash can at lunch.
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Lockdown, bomb squad, every single kid and faculty member out on the field in 95° weather for 2+ hours until parents could show up to pick up their kids.
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5. A tragedy
First week of high school. PE class, the first section was swim. This kid was playing a game with his friends in the water—who could hold their breath the longest. He was going up for air and hit head on the pointy part of the gutter, and never made it to the surface.
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Friends didn’t notice, teacher didn’t notice. Eventually football players coming back to the locker rooms noticed. He ended up dying. Teacher was fired although I wouldn’t fully blame him as he was attending and teaching kids who didn’t know how to swim or weren’t strong swimmers. One adult for over 60 kids?? That’s the school’s fault.
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6. A breakdown
A kid in my school who was very smart, got great grades, but also a kinda weird guy ended up having some sort of psychotic break while staying up for days on end working on a pretty big assignment for a class I had with him. He was already going above and beyond by making a very detailed video rather than a PowerPoint like everyone else.
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But before he even played the video for the class, he went on this suuuuuper bizarre tirade about the meaning of life and all this existential stuff that made no sense for around 30 minutes before the teacher finally got him to stop. Later that night he was apparently knocking on random doors at 2am trying to give the people in those homes the same weird speech. Then he went to a psych ward and I haven’t heard about him since.
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7. He was innocent
A guy in year 10 made a statement that “the more compact a group of people are, the higher the death toll would be in a shooting.” We were genuinely talking about shootings and somehow people mistook it that he was gonna do it. It was a joke and everyone was playing along at first. Cut to 11 months later (he was in year 11), the whole school knows, rumours got out, twisted and changed to something different.
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Kids were actually scared to come in, parents were pissed, teachers were anxious. They had to search the kid, they kicked him out 9 days before he finished for good (was still allowed to do exams but had to do separately from everyone else) the police were involved and it made the news but the news article is complete fake and bulls***. He also wasn’t allowed to prom. This was around 4-5 years ago. Also we live in England and guns are much harder to get especially to the average person who knows nothing about how to get guns.
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8. The fake military hero
My former high school got on the news for having a history teacher lie for four years about being a decorated war hero. Guy claimed to have not one, but TWO Purple Hearts, and never even served a day in the military.
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But it gets juicier: The truth came out because his ex-wife exposed him, sending evidence he was making it all up to local news stations and the school. Why’d she do it? The history teacher was having an affair with another teacher in my school. We had a lot of weird teachers at my school, but I think this story shows just how much the administration hardly vetted teachers, like holy s***.
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9. Hacking gone wrong
There was this guy in high school, pretty shy, didn’t have too many friends. Was always trying to fit in, kind of a poser but in an insecure way. I’ll call him PumpkinPie for privacy reasons. So one day PumpkinPie had the genius idea to impress his class and make them like him more: to get the chem/geography teacher and retrieve the exam question from his school account. He used a USB stick with a program on it that retrieves saved passwords from most browsers and checked the teacher’s school account every day for a couple months, until finally the teacher uploaded the exam questions.
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PumpkinPie downloaded the exams, then – and this is where he f***ed up – he gave them to people in his class that he liked. Those people started talking, and eventually people from other classes started asking PumpkinPie if he could get the answers for their class too. So then exams came round. He asked his classmates not to make it too obvious that they knew all the answers. Of course, they did. The school then saw the discrepancy in the grades and went looking in the logs of the teacher’s account access and found that it was accessed from an IP address which PumpkinPie also logged in from. Dumb f***er didn’t even use a VPN. Him and the classmates involved weren’t invited to the graduation ceremony.
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10. Hazing
I was in 8th grade at the time, but the high school I would be attending the next year had a massive hazing scandal that made international news overnight. A group of junior girls trying to join the powderpuffs went to play football against the seniors. Instead of playing, they got the s*** kicked out of them, were forced to sit in a huddle on the ground while paint and animal intestines were thrown at them, and one girl even had a bucket put over her head at it was hit with baseball bats.
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I heard later on she suffered permanent hearing loss. Someone recorded it (this was before smartphones so someone had a literal camcorder) and released it to the media. The senior girls that were identified were suspended, many of them losing college admissions, and some parents were arrested when it was found out they supplied alcohol. When I started high school we had to endure multiple school assemblies every year about how hazing is bad, and participate in week-long seminars about being more caring and considerate of our fellow students.
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11. Girls gone rogue
In 1999, four girls from my high school went on a six-week-long armed robbery spree. They knocked over four convenience stores and a bakery before police caught them.
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This happened in a conservative middle-class suburb, and altogether the girls got away with less than $5000, which might have been the most scandalous part. If they’d gone into subprime lending I’m sure their parents would have been very proud of them.
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12. Not so smart
Three kids broke into the school at night. They proceeded to spray paint one practice field, set fire to another, and burned a bunch of equipment.
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Thing is, one kid had on a VERY recognizable pair of shoes, and they were caught a couple days later.
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13. Butterfingers
Teacher spilt acid on a girl. This was in science class (obviously) in the first year of high school. The teacher was demonstrating how dangerous acid was.
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He then knocked a beaker over and it ran over the table onto a girl, and she screamed a bit, he s*** himself and took her away. Got another teacher to clean it up. He wasn’t teaching much longer in our school much longer, I also heard that the girls mum either sued or tried to sue the teacher and/or school.
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14. An eventful ski trip
When I was 16, most of my school year and the years above me went on a skiing trip. I couldn’t go because I had broken my wrist. Well, our head of Physical Education and the new Physical Education teacher apparently had a little too much fun on this trip. The new teacher had become pregnant, whilst engaged to her long term fiancé.
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My friend’s mother worked in the school and told me and my friend that she was upset in the staff room saying it was the Head of PE’s baby. He was married 12 years with four kids. His wife divorced him and then he moved school. But a few years later him and female PE teacher got married and had 3 more kids. Apparently she’s actually pregnant again now!
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15. Rotten
Don’t remember the year, but in high school some guys pranked their friend by stealing a cow’s heart from science’s dissection class and stashing it in his locker, the Friday before the March week break.
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On the Monday 9 days, later the whole floor was so smelly they had to close the school for 2 days because they had to hire a cleanup crew.
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16. Instagram scandal
In my school it is prohibited to record videos or take photos of the teachers, the principal, etc. The biggest scandal involved an Instagram page where the pupils made memes or said bad things about the teachers, posting their faces.
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The page became super popular and when the school discovered it every follower of the page was sanctioned. The owner of the page almost got sued, but he was like 13 years old so the school didn’t do it.
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17. Spiked coffee
Back in the 90’s a girl in our high school put liquid drugs in a teacher’s coffee. He was never right after that, had flashbacks in class for years.
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They never fired him though obviously, so he was by far the most interesting teacher in school. Girl got arrested and put in jail for a while. Last I heard she lives a quiet life.
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18. Mysterious ticking noise
Okay so this isn’t that shocking or scandalous but somebody in my school went round stealing clocks from the walls. One by one the clocks would go missing and none of the teachers or students knew who were doing it for a long time. It results in some teachers hiding the clocks in their classrooms in fear of them being stolen.
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I think the kid who was doing it eventually got caught because somebody heard a ticking sound coming from his school bag.
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19. Bathroom fire
Some guys (around 15) were horsing around in a bathroom during lunch break, and decided to set one of their shoes on fire, as you do. That got out of hand fast, resulting in the entire bathroom being set ablaze, which was located beside the science lab, mind you! The whole school had to evacuate, firefighters rushed in. They did manage to keep the fire from spreading, but that whole hallway of off limits for months.
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They caught the guy who did it because the mad lad was the only one missing a shoe when all the students were herded outside.
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20. Quite the mix up
Mum of a 16 year old boy ordered a ‘gorillagram’ to his lesson. Mix up at the booking agency. They sent a policewoman stripper instead.
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School reception let her in (presumably they thought she was a real policewoman?!) teacher let her start her routine and only stopped it once she had stripped to her underwear and had the boy lick cream off her.
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21. What a twist
In middle school we had increasingly intense school meetings because a new girl was getting death threats put in her locker. Like both racist and violent. Police got involved.
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Without letting anyone know, they set up a camera. Turns out it was the girl putting them in her own locker because she wanted attention.
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22. Got what he deserved
There was a male Spanish teacher at my middle school that was in a relationship with a 7th grade female student. He’d buy her expensive gifts, take her out to eat, drive her home, and other stuff. All the students knew because the girl would brag about it. The administration never did anything. I guess they thought the girl was lying.
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Fast forward to freshman year of college. The same Spanish teacher is arrested and convicted for having a relationship with a different student. It makes the news. Then the County, released a statement about how shocked they were. All of my classmates were dumbfounded. How did they not know? It was common knowledge and people tried to tell and nobody believed us.
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23. Quite the surprise
One of my classmates in high school had a baby in the school bathroom. Apparently she didn’t know she was pregnant. At least she claimed at the time.
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The news came and reported on it and our small town felt famous for a day.
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24. Unprescribed
My chemistry teacher would always fall asleep in class or just not pay attention so as teenagers we just ignored her and did what we wanted in class. A few years later she was arrested, while in class, for stealing a couple of doctor’s prescription pads and writing herself a lot of pain medicine.
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She was caught because she would go to different pharmacies to fill the medicine and her insurance didn’t know why she was jumping from one pharmacy to the next.
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25. Disgusting
We had a period of time when we had to log our bathroom visits because someone was taking out the soap bags in the soap dispensers and throwing the contents all over the bathroom.
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Then they would fill the bag with p*** and putting it back in the dispenser.
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26. So cruel
My school had an open air area in the middle that you could walk through to get to the hall. There was a small pond on one side that every year had a family of ducks. Ducklings would often waddle into the hall during PE or assembly. They were just there every year and everyone loved them.
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Came into to school one day before summer holidays and it turned out a student had come onto school grounds out of hours. They killed all the ducklings by stomping on them. Faculty said they know who did it, but as far as I know no students ever found out.
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27. Smoked out
We had a teacher at school who used to give kids money to go to the cafeteria and get him food, he said as a reward we could keep the change. We used to give his change back and ask for a cigarette instead and he gave them to us.
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He almost got snapped one day because of a rumor about him giving some kids cigarettes if they go get him lunch. He said he just gave us the change and didn’t know where the cigarette story came from. He had to stop altogether after that because he did get in trouble anyway, but he gave us smokes for like 3 years in return for getting his pies.
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28. Gone girl
A girl at my high school faked her own kidnapping over the summer between my freshman and sophomore years. Left her dogs in the car, left the keys near the car, left a broken necklace nearby. She ended up going on a road trip with a boyfriend and a friend over to the next state.
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The only reason she even came home was because a different friend told her that there was a search party trying to find her all over the state park. Apparently, the FBI met up with her at some mall in the other state and escorted her home.
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29. Pigs on the loose
This isn’t a scandal, but for my senior prank some students let 3 pigs loose in my high school. The 3 pigs were wearing white t-shirts with the numbers 1, 2, and 4, taped on them in black electrical tape.
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My school was closed the next day as they couldn’t find number 3.
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30. Caught red-handed
In elementary school, there were a series of theft cases in our class (mostly money and stationery). We had a hunch on who the thief was, mostly because this person always carried around a locked lunch box we’d never seen the contents of.
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So one day most of my classmates confronted this person and while tugging on the lunch box, it flew open, revealing the stolen items from my classmates. So my classmates just grabbed what was theirs and left the thief crying.
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31. No bomb
In high school some students stole one of the teacher’s stuffed animals (Kermit I think) for a prank. They put some red paint on him for blood and were planning to “ransom” him back to the teacher. They ended up putting Kermit in a box and the box into a different kid’s truck after school. The kid didn’t want it so he took the box out and left it in the parking lot.
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Next morning we all get turned away from school due to a bomb threat. Bomb robot approaches the box and proceeds to find Kermit. I think it ended up in some national newspapers. But hey free day off of school.
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32. A case of arson
While I was in elementary school there was a local arsonist who was going around starting fires around a part of town that held my school and the neighboring high school on the same stretch of road. The entire town was filled with ash and embers blazing throughout. The fires became so bad they actually ended up briefly burning parts of the surrounding trees around the schools.
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Both schools had to be evacuated safely and I remember seeing my school’s playground burning slowly through the glass window from afar. Arsonist was later found and convicted and the town to this day still shows signs of the fire as most of the trees are still dead after all these years.
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33. A petty prank
Walkers crisps were running a promotion where you got a Tazo (Pogs rip-off) in every pack. If you found a golden Tazo you won something that seemed like a big deal at the time. Probably a Playstation or something.
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A group of r/madlads open a packed, sprayed it gold, re-sealed the pack (with a Breville sandwich maker) and left it in the bottom of the canteen vending machine.The kid who found it thought he had won but found out it was counterfeit when he tried to claim the prize. The lads got found out and it was in the paper and stuff. I think the kid who was tricked got some consolation from Walkers.
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34. Dodgy
My high school’s arguably best teacher was our grade 11 and 12 physics teacher. During grade 12, he split with his wife and was beginning divorce proceedings because he began seeing a student that graduated 2 years before.
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The relationship didn’t “officially begin” until after she graduated, so it’s not like the school could let him go for being with a student or anything, but it was apparently pretty apparent that they were flirty even while she was still his student 2 years earlier.
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35. Food fight
We had a food fight that also made local news, in part due to other students recording and posting footage to YouTube afterward.
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From what I remember of the aftermath, they cancelled the senior prom and expelled quite a few of those who partook.
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36. No such thing as a free lunch
Pupils always had to help in the canteens. Either give out food or help with the cleaning. Obviously the teachers didn’t check their students to see if they did their job correctly. They later found out that a group of students did not only give the food and snacks out for free, but they even gave their “customers” some extra cash on top of their meals.
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Took the teachers 2 years to realise and every single student was blamed later on, while the ones who started the whole thing already left the school. A few thousand Euro were stolen if I remember correctly.
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37. Slightly extreme
This was in the early 2000s, so everyone wasn’t as connected to the world. A teacher in an assembly told a whole year group of kids that an asteroid was going to hit the earth in a wild, misguided attempt to get them all to understand the importance of “seizing the day.”
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As you can imagine, the philosophy part fell on deaf ears, the impending doom part was more prevalent. It really didn’t go as planned. Kids screaming, crying, calling parents. It made the BBC too. So much for Carpe Diem.
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38. The cheating ring
This isn’t as scandalous, but I still think it deserves to be on this thread. There was basically a rumour at my school stating that there was a secret group of students sharing the answers for upcoming chemistry exams with each other.
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Now, this cheating ring contained at least 50 kids, and it had gotten so out of hand that all the chemistry teachers begged the assistant principals to launch a full investigation into figuring out who was part of it all.
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39. A messy affair
One of the IT teachers cheated on his wife (who was like a class assistant who worked at the school) with my English teacher. The IT teacher and the wife divorced and he married said English teacher.
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She kept her maiden name thinking it would make the fact less known but everybody knew what had gone on. The IT teacher’s ex-wife ended up leaving the school from embarrassment.
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40. Changed the course of history
I grew up in a very small farm town in Missouri. The kind of town that’s so small, you can see the church steeple from anywhere in “city” limits. Many decades ago a young boy, around 8 – 10 years old I think, was walking through the woods and came across a man who had clearly been living in the woods for a bit. He was scruffy, dirty, and smelled. The man asked this boy if he had any food, and the boy said he did not. The man told the boy not to be afraid of him, and to please bring him some food. Oh, and most importantly, don’t tell ANYONE that he was there. So the boy walks back home, sneaks some cornbread out of the kitchen, and then heads back into the woods. The man is very happy. He asks the boy to come back the next day with more food. The next day at school, the boy tells several of his classmates about the man in the woods. Everyone agrees that the boy shouldn’t tell any adults, because that would ruin the fun. Instead, he should keep bringing this mysterious man in the woods food, and tell them all what happens.
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After several days of this, the boys parents become suspicious of the fact he is bringing food into the woods. They sit the boy down, and make him confess everything. The parents ask if the man hurt the boy, and thankfully, he had not. All the man wants is food. The dad grabs a newspaper and asks if the man in the paper is the man in the woods. The boy confirms that it is. The man is someone that had recently escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary, and is wanted. The county sheriff is called. A collection of Sheriff’s Deputies and citizens with guns are led to the spot in the woods where the man was. He is gone and his campfire is cold. They think he moved on the previous night. When the Sheriff asks the boy why he didn’t tell someone, the boy says he wanted to be able to tell his classmates more stories about the man in the woods. All of this is SUPREMELY unfortunate, because the man in the woods was James Earl Ray. He would go on to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. Had the boy told his parents right away, the course of American history would have been different.
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41. Infectious
This year one of the girls on the volleyball team got covid. The coach decided not to tell anyone because they had a massive game coming up and put her in.
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Long story short word got out and the volleyball team had to quarantine and about 2/3 of the team [got ill].
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42. An explosive scandal
In 8th grade, there was this kid that blew up part of the wall in science. I don’t remember how, but it had something to do with the outlet.
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He had to pay 20,000 dollars in damage fees. The only reason he didn’t get expelled was because his mom worked there.
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43. Cheaters never prosper
Almost 80% of my classmates got caught cheating during the finals exam. They tried texting each other all the answers.
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The school principal was furious because all of them had the same score, the same answers. So everyone’s phones got confiscated. And those who got strong proof that they got involved were suspended.
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44. A near miss
Someone threw a stool out of a seventh floor window and it just barely missed hitting a pregnant woman on the street below.
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I don’t remember if they figured out who did it but it was in the newspapers at the time.
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45. Dodgy business
One guy made a copy of a the skeleton key which opened all the classroom doors after leaving a window slightly open after class. He used it to break into classrooms and steal tests and distributed them to people at school for profit.
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Eventually the school caught on, and a lot of fingers were pointed. Needless to say, it all came crashing down on him.
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46. A prank gone wrong
I don’t know if this exists in other countries too but in Germany we have this tradition called “Abistreich” where the graduating students have a day to basically f*** up the school day. It comes with the privilege of going into the school before classes start, to decorate everything. For some f***ed up reasons my graduation class thought it would be a GREAT idea to p*** against doors and walls, to smuggle in alcohol, to destroy the very expensive lock system (it was shiny, new and worth 50.000€), and to smear some weird substance over the walls, floor, sinks, mirrors and toilets of all bathrooms that was almost impossible to remove.
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Because the culprits didn’t turn themselves in the cost for repair and cleaning were taken from our savings for the prom and all future graduation classes weren’t allowed to go into the school beforehand to decorate everything. Which basically means that the tradition was destroyed for everyone else after us.
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47. A robbery ring
Our student body president was the head of a robbery ring with a bunch of other seniors. They would hold up various local stores and fast food restaurants (I think one of them being a place where one of the robbers worked). The student body president ran away to avoid prosecution and, while on the run, he met up with the popular kids in senior class during their senior trip to Mexico and raged with them for like a week.
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He ended up on America’s most wanted and finally turned himself in after calling his dad from a casino in Vegas. Also, it’s worth noting that his dad was one of those attorneys who had TV commercials for class actions and stuff like that. I recognize that the story seems a little disjointed but it was a long time ago and that’s how it comes together in my head now.
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48. A toilet fire
One kid set fire to the toilet paper in the boys’ bathroom and it started a major fire, thankfully nobody was hurt and the boy got expelled. Half a year later the acting head teachers made a ban on using toilets during lessons (citing the fire as a reason) this created a load of drama. Half the teachers were on the students’ side for this and helped us have a protest. We managed to get most of the kids and parents to sign a petition.
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The head of the protest got called into a deputy’s office to get told off and was demanded to stop the petition. That night I did a load of research and told the deputy head that I was taking over the protest and that as it’s a peaceful protest there was nothing they could do to stop me. Eventually the local news got involved and the school let us use toilets during class again.
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49. Took the joke too far
Two science teachers at my former high school started a prank war on each other. Most of the pranks were generally harmless but one teacher ended up making what he thought was a mild pipe bomb.
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He put the pipe bomb in the trash can of the other teachers classroom and during the next class it exploded, obliterated the trash can and caused two students closest to it to lose hearing on one side. He was never fired, but did end up resigning a year after it happened.
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50. Money for nothing
At our high school we were required to wear student IDs around our neck and if you got caught without it you would have to pay a $10-$15 fine (can’t remember the exact amount) and same with phones, etc.
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Long story short, our Principal got caught stealing the cash and tried to blame it on one of the other teachers. It was super s****y of her and I’m glad she got fired.
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