Should graduates be punished for senior pranks?

Some senior pranks go overboard. Some don't. What's the difference?

Originally published in the Moultrie News.

I know a group of students who weren’t allowed to attend their graduation (but they still get their diplomas) because of a senior prank. Should students be kept out of such a milestone for a prank?

It depends on the prank. Some antics are destructive enough to warrant the consequence, especially since senior pranks occur so late in the day that it’s the only consequence left to give. It’s also the only deterrent schools possess to dissuade kids with “nothin’ left to lose” from doing something stupid.

Consider North Carolina’s Western Alamance High, where students egged their school and dumped trash everywhere. At Southern Alamance, they discarded old appliances on campus and poured dead fish on the wrestling mats.

Those might sound like harmless pranks to anyone who doesn’t have to clean it up. But if you’re the custodian scrubbing dried egg or collecting dead fish, you might think having the perpetrators sit out their commencement ceremony isn’t consequential enough. Pranks of that nature are thoughtless and disrespectful.

Some are worse. At North Carolina’s Williams High School, students poured cement mix into the toilets. Replacing them will cost $4,000, not including labor. At another North Carolina school, seniors destroyed $5,000 worth of furniture; at still another, they inflicted $20,000 in damages to computers. Do we really want the purveyors of these witless escapades prancing across the graduation stage to adoring cheers? They clearly aren’t yet ready for the real world, so depriving them of the photo ops that suggest they are is the least districts can do. (Also, what’s in the water in North Carolina?)

Thankfully, these seniors aren’t representative of most graduates, but their ilk will continue to grow as TikTok and other social media apps pour a steady stream of bad ideas into the heads of adolescents. Pranks are no longer about good-natured fun; they’re about accumulating views. Whenever a prank goes viral, subsequent pranksters have to turn the screw tighter, inevitably stripping it and crossing the line.

Some good news from the Williams incident comes from prank leader Alex Solari, who demonstrated refreshing repentance: “What we did is completely unacceptable. It was a prank, and it definitely went overboard … I am deeply apologetic to everyone involved. There wasn’t a lot of thinking in this obviously. There was definitely a lot of regret.” Solari, who turned himself in, got a summer job to pay for the damages. Hmm. Learning from and atoning for one’s mistakes are signs of maturity, so maybe he’s ready for the real world after all.

Of course, not all pranks are unfunny and mean-spirited. At one school, seniors turned the staff parking lot into a petting zoo. At another, seniors hired a mariachi band to follow their principal all day. As graduates received their diplomas in one ceremony, they handed the superintendent an egg. Those pranks are clever, fun, and mostly harmless.

One of the year’s best senior pranks took place at St. Andrew’s, a private boarding school in Delaware, where the school’s head, Joy McGrath, woke up one morning to find that all 70 graduates had spent the night in her living room.

The students arranged the prank with McGrath’s husband, who let the students in at 1 a.m. The next morning, McGrath and the seniors enjoyed a coffee and donut bar in McGrath’s kitchen. She thought the prank was wonderful. It was the culmination of what one senior described as the school’s “togetherness.”

What I find heartening is that the prank wasn’t designed for social media acclaim: St. Andrew’s students aren’t permitted to have cell phones. A single video taken for parents was eventually shared and went viral, surprising all the students involved.

In the aftermath, McGrath articulated three qualities of good senior pranks: “1) they are novel; 2) when revealed, the organization and planning behind them is evident; 3) they are harmless.”

There’s a lot of wisdom in that analysis, the kind adults should share with kids. Children are mimickers by nature. Today, they pattern their impulses after four billion online strangers who do not have their best interests in mind. Adults, therefore, must take extra care to help kids understand the value of kind-hearted amusement over virtual notoriety.

Read original column here.