We’ve shared posts in the past where former students revealed the wildest scandals that happened at their schools. Those posts inspired our BuzzFeed Community to share some of their own experiences. Here’s what they had to say:
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Note: Some stories include subjects of sexual assault, verbal abuse, grooming, firearms, and drug abuse. Please proceed with caution.
1. “A girl in my sophomore year English class called in two bomb threats because she wanted to get out of taking a test. It was January, and we had to sit on the football bleachers for two hours before they moved us into the neighboring middle school’s gym, auditorium, and cafeteria. One of my friends brought her instrument with her because we were in band when they called everyone out of the school. A random teacher tried to take it, and that instrument cost around $4,000! I remember sitting next to my best friend, whose dad was a captain in the police force. They were texting, and they had cleared the school twice already, but the person in charge wanted them to conduct two more sweeps before letting everyone back in.”
“One kid also hopped in his car at that time, got in an accident, and fled the scene to come back to the school, trying to act like he didn’t do anything. I do remember seeing the girl who called in the threats get walked out of the school by the police. They tried not to make a big scene, but it was kind of hard when you take her out the front doors.”
2. “A teacher in middle school went out on leave to have a baby, and her replacement was so liked that they hired him to be a constant teacher’s aid. And if someone called out, he was the first sub for any class. It was also his first job at a school, right out of university, so he was as young as he could be. Many of the middle school girls (12-15 years old) thought of him as a ‘mature hottie.’ Two girls ‘fought over’ this teacher, getting into a rather violent fight. It turned out he had sexual activity with both of them, and they both thought they could keep him all to themselves until they turned 18 and got married. Shortly after the fight was stopped, the principal sat them down and asked them to work backward down the timeline to figure out who started it. So, the dude was walked out in handcuffs less than 15 minutes after the fight started.”
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3. “This happened in the mid-’90s. The football varsity captain, varsity co-captain, and the junior varsity captain robbed the pizza place next to my after-school job and murdered someone I knew who worked there. One of the captains worked there, and they planned to stage a fake robbery, while the other two captains would pretend to be robbers and make him open the safe and registers. An off-work employee stopped by randomly while this was happening, and one of the ‘robbers’ shot him in front of his two-year-old son with the very real gun.”
“The shooter was in my psychology class, and in my desk pod (the classroom was arranged in groups of four desks pushed together). All week, our teacher would make sure we were all doing okay (the shooting happened in the strip mall closest to our high school, so dozens of juniors and seniors worked in the various businesses there).
He made comments like, ‘I hope they get him,’ and ‘That’s scary, so close to home.’ One day, maybe that same week, even, the police came to the school, and I’ll never forget how I felt in this moment. The shooter was called to the office during our class, and he just stood up, gathered his backpack and book, smiled at us all, and said something like ‘Well, that’s that’ (something that hinted at admission).
And I’m fairly certain they canceled a number of games. The joke in town was, ‘Oooh, don’t play [X] High School, they have a killer football team!’
The trial was a whole debacle because there were other football players peripherally involved, like how they got the gun from another varsity football player. He wasn’t present during the shooting, but worked at a sporting goods store and had stolen the gun from their boss.
All three were found guilty and got varying sentences. They were caught because they used a school logo football bag during the robbery and then dumped the empty bag in the park between the school and the strip mall.”
4. “A male teacher was caught trying to develop pictures of his students tied up with blindfolds — it turned out that he was also giving the kids cookies with sperm on them. He then invited his students to visit him during the summer. It was super disgusting…I was really close to having him since he was supposed to be a ‘good teacher.’ However, my mother was being persuaded to transfer me, as the teacher I actually had was said to be somewhat lazy and often untidy. As it turned out, the one I stayed with was one of the coolest teachers I’ve ever had. He was really passionate about music and tried to encourage us to learn an instrument (even if the money for said instruments came from his own pocket).”
5. “My elementary school had a part-time janitor who also worked at a funeral home preparing the deceased (embalming, dressing, etc.). He was found guilty of stealing from the bodies when a girl at my school noticed he was wearing her father’s distinctive watch a week after he passed. An investigation also discovered he was engaging in necrophilia with the female bodies when a detective literally walked in on him.”
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6. “The head captain of the Boy Scouts and the head captain of the Girl Scouts had sex in a storage room for the scouts. The teacher in charge gave the head captain of the Boy Scouts the key, knowing exactly what they were going to do. They were caught because the storage room was literally right next to the main corridor to the general office and the classrooms. And of course, that teacher denied knowing any of this, and both of the students were expelled.”
7. “One random day, the bell rang, and we all poured into the hallways like normal, but pretty quickly, it was apparent that nothing was normal. Someone had taped used maxi pads to every single doorknob, with at least 50 used pads covering every conceivable entry point. So many that you could actually smell them. This set the crowd of teenagers into a frenzy. The teachers had a hard time reigning them in while also being unwilling to touch the pads. After what seemed like an eternity, a janitor appeared, wearing gloves and pushing a trash cart. He unceremoniously went door by door, yanking the crusty pads off the handles, spritzing with some spray, and half-heartedly wiping them before moving down the hall to the next door. He looked like it was just a normal day, when we all knew it wasn’t.”
“The mystery naturally spread like wildfire. This was 1995, so the school didn’t have security cameras yet, and as far as I’m aware, the culprit was never discovered, never claimed responsibility, or made any mention of a ‘message’ or such.
The amount of pads used required a good bit of ‘saving up’ to prepare, and it was assumed the culprit was a girl, but nothing definitive was ever learned.”
8. “It was 1971 — a girl I knew whose boyfriend dealt drugs brought a bunch of really strong LSD to school to sell. For the rest of the day, we would see each other walking down the hall, tripping balls, and laughing ourselves silly — there must have been 20 of us. One of the cheerleaders got some and ran away from home. The principal grilled her but couldn’t prove anything (and then there was the band teacher who ran off with one of his students mid-semester).”
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9. “When I was in seventh grade, there was a teacher who was caught having sex with her male 13-year-old student. Apparently, they had sex 28 times within a week — she allowed the boy’s 12-year-old friend to watch them on multiple occasions. She gave them alcohol, let them drive her car, and even talked the father of the 13-year-old into letting him spend the night at her house. She got busted when the boy’s father thought it was strange his son constantly had ‘detention’ and needed to stay after school all the time.”
“This SHOOK our community of parents, teachers, and students. A good portion of us middle schoolers went to the elementary school where it occurred just the school year prior, so a lot of us either had her as a teacher or knew of her extremely well.”
10. “My school guidance counselor cheated on his wife (an English teacher at my school) with a 17-year-old and got her pregnant. This was a Christian school — the 17-year-old kept the baby because it was ‘god’s will.’ The guidance counselor and English teacher got divorced, but they both continued to work there. I was a freshman, and couldn’t understand why he didn’t go to prison.”
11. “A classmate planned the murder of her mother. She conspired with another classmate in our class to commit the murder. When the police caught them, they claimed an alibi, stating that they had flown to Frankfurt to buy fish at the market. One of them is still in prison, and the other one was released three years ago for good behavior, but we have no news about her further fate.”
12. “The athletic director and superintendent were embezzling funds from our massive sports program. They were caught because they were exchanging text messages on their school-issued phones, calling students racial slurs, and saying sexist things. The text messages ended up coming out in court and exposed many teachers’ personal business, including affairs and illnesses.”
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13. “In elementary school, a male teacher would have ‘special tutoring sessions’ with female students. Female elementary students in a school that only went up to fifth grade. I found out after I moved away and was visiting friends that he was arrested and convicted on multiple counts of inappropriate touching. I’m an instructor in a military setting where we have strict rules about no one-on-one contact with a student behind closed doors to prevent stuff like this. It’s sad that a rule like this can’t seem to be enforced in an elementary school.”
14. “There was a huge orgy when I was 14 — a bunch of other 13-year-olds and 14-year-olds had big orgies during the summer. The school kicked them out (I think around 10 people). A lot of parents were called in that week when the pastor of the school found out they did it in his classroom — he was furious.”
15. “There were several guys who bought enough cocaine to turn $100,000 or so into millions. They didn’t account for the school being on the Department of Defense’s server (this was a military school). And apparently, keywords were flagged somewhere. The FBI, DEA, and other 3LA’s showed up one day.”
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16. “Our Orchestra teacher starred in pornographic films, and it took the school over three months to terminate her after finding out.”
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17. “In high school, the principal (who lived right across the street from me) got accused of sexual assault against a student who was his adopted son living with him. The kid had behavioral issues, so a lot of people didn’t believe the student. The principal was allowed to keep his job. During the next school year, a student wore a wire into his office and got the principal on recording.”
18. “I’m originally from Scotland, and I moved to the US when I was nine years old. I went into third grade at this small private school. I have learning disabilities, and on top of that, I was experiencing really bad depression and homesickness. I literally cried at school for WEEKS just because of how sad I was. I kept forgetting my homework, either at home, or I couldn’t complete it because I’d forgotten the necessary tools to do it at school. One day, I forgot my time tracker at school, so I couldn’t do my math homework. My mum wrote a note to my math teacher, and when she saw it, she came into my homeroom classroom and screamed at me in front of everyone.”
“It was so bad that my language arts teacher next door could hear it and came in to comfort me as I sat there crying. Meanwhile, my homeroom teacher sat there and did nothing.
The yelling continued for at least 10 minutes. That day, my mum picked me up from school, and when she asked how my day had gone, I started crying and told her what had happened.
My mum is a ‘you know not to mess with her kids’ kind of person — she goes into ‘Mama Bear Mode!’ She did an immediate U-turn back to the school and got the teacher fired.”
19. “A chemistry teacher got sacked because after repeatedly warning one particular student about wearing his safety glasses, she taught him a lesson by spraying him in the eyes with a chemical solution.”
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20. “Our high school gym teacher made us wear thin white sweatpants without underwear and stare up at us while we sat on the bleachers. He was notorious for dating underage girls, and one year, he married a girl right after she graduated. You would see them driving around in a pickup truck with the economics teacher sitting between them.”
21. “There was a kid in my grade who was a super popular jock. During gym class one day, he decided to moon a group of popular girls. He turned around, pulled down his shorts, and then, at the same time, accidentally pooped. The best part was that he was a total jerk to begin with.”
22. “Someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the office, thinking they could erase their report card grades. Grades were no longer stored on hard copies. It was already in the computer with offsite backups.”
23. “At university, my history class did an annual three-day field trip to London for a first-year module. An urban legend was spread around about a student who got so drunk on absinthe that he wrote drunken messages with his own shit all over the bathroom walls and mirror. The smell of his excrement and the commotion woke up the entire hostel at 4 a.m. and nearly got our entire university barred.”
“Fast-forward a few years. I started working in a call center and found out that one of the supervisors not only went to my university but also studied history five years prior. He went on the same field trip and stayed in the same hostel as I did.
He was in the same dorm as the drunken student and remembered his lecturer waking him up in the early hours…”
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24. “One of my best friends at the time was secretly having an affair with the English teacher, whose wife was pregnant. Her mother discovered their love letters and reported him. It turned out that he had left his previous school for the same reason. He didn’t get fired this time because she was 18, and he waited for her to graduate to pursue her physically. That girl was in therapy for years and would have panic attacks if she saw him around town because she desperately wanted to be with him. And his wife ended up having a stillborn child. It was super depressing.”
25. “I once had a high school theater teacher ‘jokingly’ tell me to die by suicide in front of the entire class because I was crying about something unrelated. Everyone just kind of went quiet, like, ‘Huh???’ And then she got really offended that we weren’t laughing about it. The tech theater teacher (an actual saint) called my parents that night to check on me and made sure they knew because he knew I wasn’t going to stand up for myself on my own. Teachers, in general, are fantastic and underappreciated, but that woman was something else.”
26. “One of the science teachers would confiscate phones if he saw you using them in class. This was back in the days of flip phones, so they were easy to look through. He was sending himself nudes that the girls had taken of themselves, and he forgot to delete the text history on one of them. One girl told her parents, and then her parents told the school. After a search of his phone and computer, they found dozens of pictures of naked girls. He was fired, and we never heard what happened to him.”
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27. “This was in the mid-’90s, and it was a huge deal at my Catholic school. The editors of our school newspaper were instructed by the administration not to print an article about LGBTQ+ issues. They printed the paper with the article included but redacted. They held a sit-in in the main hall of the school, with their mouths taped shut and ‘censored’ written on them. 30 years later, I can still see them sitting there.”
28. “When I was in elementary school in the ’90s, we were coming in from recess. The boy standing next to me was shot by a stray bullet (some kid was shooting birds in his backyard, and the bullet hit my friend). If the boys and girls line was reversed, it would have been me (and I was two inches shorter than he). It hit him in the chest, and luckily not his heart. He lived, but it traumatized me.”
29. “A guy and a girl (both in ninth grade, from what I can remember) decided to throw down and have sex with each other in a classroom in front of the entirety of the class. The teacher was out of the room — it was chaos. People yelling, some encouraging them, and others objecting. The teacher came back, and some of the students actively held the door to prevent her from interrupting. The cops got involved — it was all over the news, and the school shut down for like three days.”
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30. “My high school had an awesome computer club, especially for the ’90s. But it was damn hard to get into. I tried constantly with no luck. In my senior year, the teacher in charge of it and some students were arrested for counterfeiting money. The older I get, the more I can’t understand why an adult would team up with teenagers to do such a thing.”
31. “My Spanish teacher tried to get me arrested for ‘assault.’ He backed down pretty quickly when I brought up the fact that the assault was me pushing him away from the door he was blocking (he refused to let me out of the classroom). I said, ‘I think there’s a term for holding someone against their will…'”
32. “In high school, we got these new laptop carts. They were essentially carts on wheels designed to hold laptops and a printer, which could be rolled around to different classrooms. The teacher in another room accidentally printed her emails on the cart printer. I picked them up thinking it was my paper, but it was NOT. It was six pages of spicy emails between the teacher and principal, who were both married to other people. They were NASTY.”
33. “I went to a Catholic high school. The priest on the faculty got a girl pregnant, then paid for an abortion (and the Bishop paid off the girl’s family to keep it quiet). The Pennsylvania grand jury exposed it 20 years later.”
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34. “When I was 15, the vice principal was trying to physically yank an earring out of my friend’s ear. I went to stick up for my friend and tried to pull the VP off my friend. He turned around to me and attempted to restrain me in a Nelson hold. I slipped to the floor out of the hold. While he stood over me, he raised his foot to stomp me! I looked up and saw an open locker, and I kicked it hard into his face. I guess it broke his nose. I jumped up, and my friends were egging me on, so I knocked the VP to the floor. To this day, when he encounters me at my grandkids’ teacher conferences, he won’t make eye contact and stays away from me. Serves him right for abusing kids years ago.”
35. “We had a kid drown during gym class. He couldn’t swim, so the teacher had him swim laps in the shallow end with a kickboard while the rest of the class played water polo. Fast-forward, and halfway through the polo match, someone noticed the kid wasn’t swimming laps next to us. A student got out of the pool and looked and saw him at the bottom of the deep end. The teacher dove down and pulled him up, and started performing CPR, but it was too late. I’ll never forget it — it was very traumatizing and such a heartbreak for the kid’s family who lost him.”
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36. “We had a BMX bike riding show held in our gym for some self-esteem message, and they made an announcement at the beginning to the tune of ‘we are riding full speed in the hallway before entering the gym so we can do our tricks. We don’t have brakes on our bikes, so do not cross in front of that door for any reason.’ They made the announcement a couple of times because they were concerned that a student might not be listening. The show came to a halt when the yearbook teacher got absolutely rammed when she crossed in front of the door to get a better picture. Someone got it on video and put the clip to ‘Wrecking Ball.’ It went viral around our school.”
37. “In my high school, there were two kids who sprayed pepper spray into the school’s ventilation system because they didn’t want to go to class. Many people fell ill, and hazmat-suited personnel would appear each time it happened. Initially, the evacuation would last for a few minutes, then half an hour, then an hour or two, and eventually half a day. Eventually, students would say ‘fuck it’ and leave school entirely. Come exam time, two separate bomb threats were called in from the same kids. Our principal at the time was a former cop who ended up helping the police figure out who the culprits were, and the kids were brought up on a slew of charges.”
38. “A girl in my grade (who was a habitual liar) told everyone she had cancer. For a few weeks, everyone gave her sympathy until her twin sister was asked how she was doing with the recent news. She was totally shocked and blatantly said that her sister didn’t have cancer.”
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39. “I lived in a small town in Florida. We were a brand new school, and there were quite a few scandals. There was a bus loop at my school, where buses would be lined up on each side of the loop, with a walkway down the middle. A boy who said goodbye to his girlfriend was stabbed to death in the middle of the bus loop. Another scandal involved a girl at my school whose family owned a restaurant. One day, she took money out of the restaurant safe and paid people in school to be her friend. When her parents called the school, the counselors tried to get the money back from the kids, but not all of them gave it back.”
40. And, “When I was in high school, two female teachers found out they were having an affair with the same younger man. The man was in his early twenties, so it was legal, but the teachers were both in their fifties and married. The day after they found out, one teacher asked to speak with the other in the parking lot outside my homeroom classroom. They ended up in a fistfight in the parking lot during homeroom. All the kids in that room just watched and cheered them on. It was my English teacher that year, whom I despised, and the art teacher who ran my homeroom. The principal found out, suspended them both, and ended up calling their husbands!”
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Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
If you are concerned that a child is experiencing or may be in danger of abuse, you can call or text the National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453(4.A.CHILD); service can be provided in over 140 languages.
Let’s flip the script just a little bit: If you’re a teacher (or used to be), what’s the biggest scandal that happened at your school? Share with us in the comments below or in this Google Form if you want to remain anonymous. The best submissions will be in a BuzzFeed Community post.
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