When people look back at their time spent in school, the bigger, more significant moments that usually come to mind tend to be personal. And then there are people like the ones found in a Reddit thread about school scandals, who shared stories from their time in school that sound more like an episode of Degrassi. Some of these scandals will have the reader laughing, others will have the reader cringing, but regardless of the reaction it causes, there is a good chance that after each story, the reader will be left saying, “Scandalous!”
1. Inappropriate Is An Understatement
My English teacher in the eleventh grade was sleeping with the entire girl's basketball team in exchange for straight As. I actually failed English that year but when that made the news my school said I didn’t have to go anymore because he wasn’t doing the grading properly. Everyone else who had him as an English teacher got a B.
2. Good In Theory
One year during exams, they were trying to add a new method to prevent cheating, where a man from the administration came to every class before every exam and collected students' phones. He then stuck a sticker with a number on each phone and gave the same sticker to the student so they could get their phone after school.
This was done to prevent anyone from taking someone else's phone that looked alike. This actually worked a bit at first at "preventing cheating," but then one day some guy snuck into our high school and into that room while the man who collected the phones wasn’t there. He took every single phone that was there and then left.
3. Hands Across The Hallway
My middle school banned hugging and hand-holding during course changes because it blocked the hall. In protest, every student in the eighth grade stood up and hugged each other during their lunch period. It didn’t go over well with the administration and resulted in a bunch of students getting detention. It even made the cover of the Charlotte Observer.
4. Terrible Timing
My high school did a block lunch, where everyone ate lunch at the same time instead of separating them into A, B, C lunches. Because our cafeteria couldn’t fit the entire student body, it was normal for kids to be eating in the hallway, on the floor, or at tables, all throughout the school. One day during lunch, unbeknownst to the staff and student body, our AP decided to hold a lockdown drill.
He got on the intercom and told everyone there was an active shooter in the cafeteria to see how kids would react had it been a real. It turned into pure anarchy, with kids calling 9-1-1, kids running out of school and not returning to class after the drill was over, kids having anxiety attacks while hiding in classrooms, and thought to be last calls from students to parents.
It was pretty bad, especially when you take into account that this was several days after the Parkland Shooting.
5. Worse Than Anyone Imagined
Some students broke into a local elderly reverend's home to rob him, thinking he was away. He sadly wasn't, and they proceeded to bludgeon him and his wife, while they were sleeping, with baseball bats and bottles. They were caught pretty quickly, and although their names legally couldn't be published because they were minors, everyone knew who committed the act.
The media caused a circus at our school for weeks by continuously harassing any student for comment, which many students gave because they thought it was “cool.” Although these three kids, who were 13, 14, and 15 years old, were known to cause trouble, no one ever suspected they would be capable of doing what they did.
6. No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
There was this kid at my school whose girlfriend brought a knife to school and planned to take her own life in the bathroom there. He knew her locker combination, so he took the knife and hid it in his so she wouldn't do it and wouldn't get busted. Someone snitched on him and he got expelled for having a knife on campus. The whole town heard about it and couldn’t believe it.
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7. You Never Truly Know Someone
A kid in my senior year short story class—who sat directly behind me—was charged with the stabbing, beheading, and burning of his friend/dealer. I remember the day like it was yesterday. I was sitting in my short story class when my teacher came in in tears because she just heard the news. All of the students didn't find out about it until later.
I actually have a friend who testified in his trial because he purchased his "tools" at the hardware store she worked at.
8. Nepotism
We had a computer teacher/football assistant coach who was just blasted all day and had so many DWI charges he had to get rides to work, but was the cousin of the superintendent so he kept his job. Let’s just say that when he crashed a student’s car in the parking lot because he convinced them to let him borrow it that that was the beginning of the end of it.
It was a small town, so the scandal got out. Everyone knew that the superintendent tried to cover it up by attempting to convince the kid to take the heat for it. To no one’s surprise, the kid was not convinced. Even after all of that, the school administration still let the superintendent keep his job for another two years.
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9. Acceptable But Definitely Not Ethical
This happened between my sister and brother graduating, so it would have been 1996 or 1997. The high school Ag teacher started dating a student at some point. Everyone knew about it and the parents consented. Our high school was, and still is, small enough to participate in senior trips, and the Ag teacher went along as a chaperone when his girlfriend was a senior.
They shared a hotel room, when I believe the student was still technically a 17-year-old minor. At the time, I remember my parents being rather put off by it, but they still hired the guy as a summer farmhand. I don't remember if he was fired or stepped down, but by the time I made it to high school, we had a different Ag teacher.
They got married and had a child, but got divorced maybe five or ten years ago. Strangely enough, their kid goes to our high school now. I don't know why it wasn't a huge deal at the time, but no one really raised a stink or threatened to call the authorities. Today it feels like a case of grooming by a predatory farm boy.
10. Awkward Question
The 30-year-old-ish theater teacher ran off with a recent graduate. 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 cozier than appropriate. As much as I really want to hear the inside scoop, I can't imagine friending her on social media and asking, "So what was up with you and Mr. ___?"
11. When Sharing Is Not Caring
In middle school, during the eighth grade, in the early 2000s, one of the hot girls sent a couple of intimate and private pictures to her boyfriend and it wasn't long until half the school had them. The authorities ended up becoming involved to make sure any and all copies were destroyed. The main people involved with the photo were reprimanded but not charged.
The girl had a sit down with a counselor to discuss what happened, and we all had a big assembly to discuss the consequences that could happen if people shared those kinds of images. It scared a lot of kids straight.
12. After School Activities
In high school, there was a little scandal involving the teachers and a club called the "hot tub club." Faculty members that had hot tubs would host a weekly hot tub party with other hot tub owners. Turns out, they were all getting wasted and having a swinging party every Wednesday, until somebody's spouse found out about it.
Suffice to say, there was a huge exodus of the hot tub teachers my senior year. To be clear though, nobody was fired from the school for being in the hot tub club. Instead, teachers left because it was convenient timing with the opening of another high school, and there was constant babble about it, so that didn’t help.
13. Shouldn’t Have Ate That Popcorn
Our chemistry teacher accidentally dropped her entire block of potassium into a beaker full of water, which lit her classroom on fire and blew up her desk. It happened the year before I was in her class.
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14. Dangerous Game
The first week of high school in gym class was swimming. This didn’t happen in my class, but the class after. This kid was playing a game with his friends in the water to see who could hold their breath the longest. It was just harmless fun—until it wasn't. He was going up for air and hit his head on the pointy part of the gutter, and never made it to the surface.
His friends didn’t notice, and the teacher didn’t notice either. Eventually, some football players coming back to the locker rooms noticed, but it was too late, as the kid ended up passing on. The 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 sounds like the school's fault to me.
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15. Scary To Think What Could’ve Happened
A girl in my middle school was telling people she had a “hit list” of people whose lives she was going to end. She ended up getting caught with the list and was sent to a hospital for a while for a psychiatric evaluation. She spent quite some time there before finally being released and ended up coming back to high school a few years later.
16. One Action Can Change A Life Forever
My graphics teacher was married to my math teacher, and one night he took her life during a domestic dispute. She was apparently having an affair and started taunting him about it in an argument while waving a fire poker at him. He grabbed the poker from her and hit her over the head with it, which ultimately ended her life.
He was sent to prison for manslaughter as opposed to first or second-degree murder because the court accepted the defense that there was no premeditation involved in the incident. My mom was also a teacher at the school and was friends with both of them, so it had a big impact on my family, as well as the entire school.
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17. Ultimate Fighting Classroom
There was this one time at school when girl A decided to fight girl B in class. Girl A ripped girl B’s hair out, broke her nose, and crippled her. After it was broken up, girl B was sent to the emergency room, and girl A was suspended for two weeks. I should also mention that this fight happened when they were both in the seventh grade.
18. Pushed To The Limit
There was an overachieving student in my grade who went nuts and pooped in a bag in a teacher's classroom. She also thought she could run up trees. She was a bright student who was assumed to be on a fast track out of school, but after all of that, she didn’t end up skipping a few years and going to university early like she was predicted to do.
19. Fire In The Crack
A couple of kids burnt down our sixth form building by setting deodorant on fire in the direction of a crack in one of the outside walls. It turns out there was a gas pipe on the other side, and the rest is history.
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20. Cutting Up The Scandal
The lab head, also known as the PI—principal investigator—was married but was having an affair with one of the postdocs. The wife found out about it and came to the lab one day to catch the two of them and let them know she knew. Well, it ended up where the wife chased the postdoc, who was sleeping with her husband, around the lab with scissors.
This was in front of everyone, including the numerous shocked grad students. The PI later divorced the wife and remarried the postdoc he was sleeping with. But this insane story doesn't even end there. Then, he was able to get his new wife a job as head of her own lab in the same department because he was head of the department. 15 years later, they remain professors at the institution and are still married.
However, the story lives on and has been passed on throughout the years. Grad students, to this day, still joke about the shady stuff and the professors in question get anonymous gifts around the holidays of scissors from random people at the school. It's become a thing, mainly because people still find the situation disgusting and wrong.
Everyone mainly felt this way because the PI and post-doc were allowed to keep their jobs. So, since the whole thing has been swept under the rug, there isn’t much anyone can do other than send those people scissors to remind them that everyone knows.
21. Think Before Acting
Back when the Harlem Shake was a craze, we had an RE teacher who desperately enjoyed being the popular teacher, so he got in on the craze. He invited 40 pupils from my year to his classroom at lunch and filmed his own Harlem Shake video, which in itself would’ve been against safeguarding rules. The thing is, he also taught health education.
Everyone got into his cupboard before the start of the video for "props." The video ended up essentially being a group of 14-year-old’s throwing vibrators and condoms around the room while he, of his own accord, grinded on a life-size cutout of the Pope. He was suspended and under investigation for half a year, but surprisingly kept his job. He was a lot more professional when he returned.
22. Lasting Effects
There was a fatal accident involving a girl in the pool during an event at our school. The swim teacher was blamed and later prosecuted. The girl who lost her life was in my sister's class, and they were both seven years old at the time. That happened over 10 years ago, but the parents haven't had another child since, and she was their only child.
23. Fire In The Stall!
Some kids at my school didn’t want to take a state-mandated test, so they thought the best way to get out of it was to light fireworks off in the bathroom. The plan was stupid to begin with—but when it went wrong, it went wrong hard. What they failed to realize was how quickly the fireworks would explode, and all three of them got severely burnt. The whole school had to stand outside for hours, so in a way, the plan worked.
24. Pregnancy Jinx
When I was in school, there was a girl who was overweight, and as a result of how she carried that weight, she looked quite pregnant. Teachers kept pulling her and her parents into conferences to talk about it, and after however many times it happened, the parents got fed up and got the school to agree that they would no longer "alert" the parents if they thought the girl was pregnant.
About a year later, she stopped showing up to school. This was during sophomore or junior year of high school. There were rumors about what happened—she got involved with some older kids, ran to Mexico, got busted robbing 7/11, etc. It turns out, she was actually pregnant and was attempting to give birth, alone, in the bathroom at home before her parents figured it out.
25. Keen Observation
Our physical education teacher hit the principal on the head because he protested that the students were being treated too roughly during sports class.
26. The Price Of Fame
There was this guy in high school who was pretty shy and didn't have too many friends. He was always trying to fit in, and was 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 by retrieving the exam questions from the chem/geography teacher’s school account.
He used a USB stick with a program on it that retrieves saved passwords from most browsers, like chrome, internet explorer, firefox, etc. He waited for the perfect moment to plug it in—when the teacher was taking a quick bathroom break. The whole class saw it and he made up some excuse, I don't remember what he said, then everyone kind of forgot about it.
He checked the teacher's school account every day for a couple of months until finally the teacher uploaded the exam questions. PumpkinPie downloaded the exams, then—and this is where he messed 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, the exams came around. He asked his classmates not to make it too obvious that they knew all the answers. Of course, they did. They all had way higher grades than usual. Then one day, he received a call from the school, which never happened before. Basically they said, “Hi PumpkinPie, you need to come to the school and talk to the principal right now.”
He asked why, and then his heart dropped as she said, "because it looks like you are the one behind something troublesome.” Apparently, they 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.
The dumb kid didn't even use a VPN. Then he realized how much he had messed up. You see, he had just turned 18, which meant that he would be treated as an adult should the authorities ever get involved. Anyway, he went to school and had a really hard decision to make. Either the whole class would have to redo the exam, or he gave the names of the people he gave the exams to and only they would have to retake it.
He chose the latter, and everyone hated him for it. Him and the classmates involved weren't invited to the graduation ceremony. The hacked teacher was also considering pressing charges for privacy violation, but somehow he managed to convince the teacher not to. Anyway, he was already insecure, and at this point, he just couldn’t look any of his classmates in the eyes anymore.
It got so bad that he ended up moving to an entirely different country. Now, he uses a dumb alias online whenever he talks about it. Something with a pumpkin in it, hence the name I chose. I’m not sure why at this point, since it's pretty obvious he's talking about himself, but if it makes him feel secure, then to each their own.
27. Taking Things Too Far
I was in the eighth 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 powder puffs went to play football against the seniors. Instead of playing, they were beaten up and forced to sit in a huddle on the ground while paint and animal intestines were thrown at them.
One girl even had a bucket put over her head that was then hit with baseball bats. I heard later on that 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, with many of them losing college admissions.
Some of the parents were even charged when it was discovered that they had bought and supplied booze for the girls. 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.
28. When Your Favorite Movie Is Dazed And Confused
At my school, male students were making paddles in woodshop class and using them to paddle incoming freshmen. These weren't the thin hazing paddles that you sometimes see in movies, they were two by sixes with holes drilled in them and a carved handle on one end. One of the ones that they showed us in our assembly the next year was so big it took two hands to wield it.
One kid had his tailbone broken from being hit so many times. The football coach was also the woodshop teacher and he kept his job but he was no longer allowed to coach football or teach woodshop. Our state champion football program disintegrated. He was allowed to start coaching again a few years ago, and there is no more hazing—that we know of.
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29. From Two To None
One girl literally kicked a guy in the balls so hard that he had to be hospitalized. The girl was 15 years old and the boy was 11 years old. Surprisingly, there was no action taken against the girl because of the supposed “lack of evidence”.
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30. Wrong On So Many Levels
In the eighth grade, one of my friend’s parents had cancer and he thought it was a good idea to bring some of his parent’s meds to school and hand them out like candy. These were strong, strong meds, and not all of them were pain pills. At least five kids overdosed and two of them had seizures, but thankfully everyone survived.
31. Friday Night School-Down
When I was in grade 9, which was all the way back in 2009, there was a school fight that lasted the entire break and carried over into the next session. There were even three teachers involved. The injury rate was ridiculous—it was like a freaking battlefield. There were over 15 broken noses, two broken ribs and some people even stretched their optical nerves.
There was another, separate fight between two guys, where one guy gave the other guy a DDT three times onto the tiled floor. The guy on the receiving end of the wrestling move ended up losing his gold tooth in the process. Someone found it and took it home with them, and then came back a week later with the gold tooth in his mouth.
32. What Goes Around Comes Around
I had a friend whose stuff kept going missing in school, like books and pens. It didn't stop even after multiple complaints from him, and it didn’t help that the teachers didn't really care. His mom wound up coming in and screamed at the teachers. The principal then did her own investigation and concluded that it was a boy who took my friend’s stuff.
The principal decided to call the male student’s parents to talk to them. After a year, it turned out that the thief was a girl and she threw the guy's stuff out the window because the guy was picking on her.
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33. Easiest Interview Ever
Our high school principal got caught taking money from prospective teachers and giving them interview questions ahead of time.
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34. Stompin’ In My Air Force Ones
Three kids broke into the school at night. They proceeded to spray paint one of the practice fields, set fire to another practice field, and burned a bunch of equipment. They probably would have gotten away with it, but the thing is, one of the kids had on a very recognizable pair of shoes, and they were caught a couple of days later.
35. That’s Just Meme!
My school is prohibited from recording videos or taking photos of the teachers, the principal, etc. Due to this, the biggest scandal involved an Instagram page where the pupils made memes or said bad things about the teachers and posting their faces. 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.
36. Smear Campaign
Someone made a huge mess in the boys' bathroom at my high school, and by huge mess, I mean a full-scale poo horror show. The walls, the stalls, the bowls, the sinks were all covered. We had a big assembly about it and our deputy head teacher was urging whoever knew anything to come forward. The cleaners refused to go near it and they had to get industrial cleaners in suits to come in.
The deputy head teacher would not let it go. He was a former officer of the law, so he saw it as a detective-style mystery. He’d randomly pull people out of class to interview them, he’d lose his mind in assemblies, he just would not stop. You could see even the other teachers cringe as he was still fixating on it six months later.
We’d all laugh every single time he mentioned it, and of course the name, “the poo bandit” was born. People would accuse their friends of it for a laugh, and one time this really sweet, chunky kid got accused of being the poo bandit. He took it well and saw the funny side to it, which gained him a lot of popularity in the end.
I’m 30 now and if I ever mention the poo bandit to any single person that was in my school they instantly remember it and start laughing. I remember one time someone said, “I am the poo bandit” in assembly, and then another person stood up and said the same, and another, and another. It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever encountered.
The deputy head teacher never did find the poo bandit. It forever remains a cold case scandal.
37. What Happens On The 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.
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 had been married for 12 years with four kids at the time. His wife divorced him and he changed schools, but a few years later, him and the female PE teacher got married and had three more kids. Apparently, she’s actually pregnant again!
38. Forgot Something
I don't remember the year, but in high school, some guys pranked their friend by taking a beef's heart from the science's dissection class and stashing it in his locker the Friday before March break. Then nine days later, the whole floor was so smelly they had to close the school for two days because they had to hire a cleanup crew.
39. Stab And Run
During art class, one of the cool kids jokingly went to stab his friend with a craft knife, and he accidentally did. They’re tiny blades, so the friend was fine, but Stabby realised he was in deep trouble and legged it out of school. He ended up on the run from the teachers and authorities, who had been called, but it only took a few hours for him to be found hiding at a friend’s house.
40. Creep Show
Our chemistry teacher got fired for taking pictures of girls' shoes and putting them on a foot-friendly website. He convinced them to pose for the pictures by saying he would give them $20 for old used shoes they had for his wife's charity, which was obviously fake. He made the girls try on the shoes so he could “catalogue" them better and took the pictures.
I think there was some joint lawsuit filed against him later on.
41. Love Over Hate
One of the teachers at my school had books like Call Me By Your Name and Love, Simon in their personal library for students to borrow. Those books were also suggested material for final projects in that teacher's classes. An extremely conservative group threatened to sue the school because of it, and the school followed through on every single one of the group's demands.
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42. School Of Intolerance
During my wife’s senior year, a kid attempted to take his own life in the bathroom because the private Christian school they attended was basically super anti-LGBT and the kid was gay. The school responded by having special times for everyone to meet with counselors and tried to cover up the fact that they caused this kid so much pain that he attempted to take his own life.
That same year, one of my wife’s classmates was super sick and the school didn’t care. The girl ended up being named valedictorian and the week before graduation she came up in front of the whole school, including a ton of parents, during an assembly and talked about how terrible the school was and badmouthed it relentlessly.
She said so many negative things about the school that the parents held a special meeting with the school board to ban her from attending her own graduation.
43. That’s Plain Wrong
Our Spanish teacher asked a student to fill up her cup with water from the water fountain. Instead, he took the cup into the bathroom, urinated in it, and filled the rest up with water. Some students saw him and reported him, and he was even seen taking the cup into the bathroom on the cameras. He got a significant charge from the authorities for that. It was the disgusting thing I've ever seen.
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44. Terrible Reasoning
Our valedictorian was stripped of the honor because it was revealed that she was pregnant. It wasn’t so much the pregnancy that led to her losing the honor, but due to the fact that she had complications and had to finish the last month of school from the hospital, which led to the school arguing that she didn't finish the school year, which is still ridiculous.
45. Where’s My Money
In college, the vice president embezzled $300,000 from the school over a period of several years. She had a very short prison sentence followed by house arrest until the money was repaid to the school. I was laid off from my student job along with a few other kids due to the budget crunch that resulted in her getting caught. We never got repaid our lost wages.
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46. Don’t Go In There
I can't remember the exact numbers but a bunch of students had taken their own life in a specific bathroom in our high school, even after it had been sealed off and the door had been nailed shut. Students would still find a way in to take their own life. This became a problem, as neighboring high schools would refer to us with awful names at sporting events.
This would lead to that team not only losing the game but every student on that team being suspended, and if the student was caught they were expelled. I remember the bathroom being open for maintenance because something broke and water had leaked out into the hallway. I went into that bathroom merely to be inside it and it just reeked, in both smell and feel.
I also had this crippling feeling of being watched and that I was next. I never went back to that bathroom after that.
47. Tragedy In April
Senior year, there was a freak snowstorm in April, during which the quietest and nicest stoner in our class went missing. A day later, they found his car in a ditch—but he was nowhere to be found. Then a week later the snow melted—and people made a horrifying discovery: His body, a few miles from the car. He’d crashed and, in his presumed high state, got out of the vehicle to walk for help with no coat on.
He eventually found a telephone pole and sat down against it to rest and was believed to have passed due to being frozen from the storm. Seeing his mom at her only child’s funeral still haunts me.
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48. That Kid Has Claws
A kid in my class sent an email to the White House threatening to hurt Socks, the Clintons' cat. The Secret Service showed up a few days later after they tracked down the computer the message was sent from.
49. One Night Changed Everything
A kid in my school who was very smart and got great grades, but was also kind of a 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.
But I guess the pressure got to him, because this was a presentation that none of us will ever forget. Before he even played the video for the class, he went on this super bizarre rant 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 2 AM, trying to give the people in those homes the same weird speech.
After that, he was sent to a psych ward, and I haven't heard about him or seen him ever since.
50. Watch Where You’re Going
In science class during my first year of high school, my teacher was demonstrating different types of acid and how dangerous they were. Then the worst possible scenario happened. He knocked a beaker over and the acid ran over the table and onto a girl. She screamed, he was beside himself until he snapped out of it and took her away while another teacher cleaned up the mess.
He didn’t teach much longer at our school after that. I also heard that the girl's mother either sued or tried to sue the teacher and possibly the school for the lasting damages that occurred to the girl’s leg. The acid had gone through her leggings and kind of mixed with her skin so she had to get some skin grafts to cover it.
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