Teaneck High School senior prank leads to vandalism, arrest of 62 students

[alp227]

Source: Bergen Record

More than 60 members of Teaneck High School’s senior class were arrested Thursday morning after a prank that police said involved urinating in the hallways of the high school, smearing Vaseline on doors, flipping desks and littering the school with balloons and other debris.

The students entered the school in the middle of the night and broke chairs and desks, scrawled graffiti and Vaseline on the doors and urinated, Acting Police Chief Robert Carney said at a press conference this morning.

Carney said that of the 62 arrested, 38 are juveniles. All have been charged with criminal mischief and burglary, and the juveniles have been turned over to their parents.

“To go into a school and damage a school, that’s not a prank. That’s criminal mischief,” Carney said.

Read more: http://www.northjersey.com/news/teaneck-high-school-senior-prank-leads-to-vandalism-arrest-of-62-students-1.1006861

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This story made the AP. Sheesh. This school just cannot escape the negative headlines. In the early '90s, the high school had a lot of student protests over the police killing of Phillip Pannell. In 2003, its principal was acquitted of child molestation. But the same principal was convicted of having sexually explicit talks with a student. In 2012, a football game was delayed due to a shooting threat.

[pangaia]

1. That's my alma mater! 1961

What the heck happened to the place?

Nothing like that then..

[happyslug]

19. That is 50 years ago....

I remember in the 1970s talking to a upper middle class white male about his Alma Matter, Westinghouse High School of the City of Pittsburgh. That was 50 years after he had graduated. He told me when in was in Westinghouse it was almost 100% white, but the 1970s it was almost 100% African American. My High School (South Hills High also of the City of Pittsburgh) had just beat Westinghouse at Westinghouse in Basketball. My High School was only about 40% African America and had not won a game in years. The Win of South Hills over Westinghouse lead to a riot. My fellow students at South Hills first question was " What we have a basketball team?" (It turned out we did, the people who wanted to play Basketball knew about it, but no one else cared).

I bring this up, for Westinghouse High School in the 1970s was considered a very bad high school, mostly do to the fact the neighborhood it was located it had shifted from Upper Middle Class in the 1920s to working class in the 1940s, then to the poor in the 1960s, as the Upper Middle Class and the Working Class moved to the Suburbs.

I suspect similar changes in the pool of students going to your old high school since 1961. Since the 1960s suburbs have expanded even more, leaving older homes in the older central cities to be abandoned or filled with people who could not afford any more expensive homes (i.e. the poor, including the Working Poor). The poor, tend to have very short terms goals (i.e. where is my next mean coming from?) which lead to problems with stability in families (The more stable the family, the better the children of such families do in school and the less likely such children will resort to violence). Less stable families, less security for the children, which in turn leads such children to opt for violence in many situation.

Please note the above is a very simplified view of the problems of most inner city youths, but the tendency exists. i.e. poorer the family, the less stable is the family, less security for the children and thus a tendency to opt for violence to resolved disputes. The best way to improve stability is to maintain income to such families, but the right wing opposes welfare for they want low income workers with the costs associated with such workers shifted to others, i.e. shifted to the victims of the violence, that low income tends to produce.

[Walk away]

2. I am a member of the class of '72 and....

back then this would have been considered extracurricular activities. I love the last comment about what a criminal hotbed it is. Yes, they had one principal who was bad and now gone. Protests about the shooting of a local kid by the police is a GOOD THING and the football game threat is a joke.

This is a school with over 1,300 students from a very diverse population. That more people than some towns in Yokel Land where everyone looks alike and thinks alike. It's amazing how few incidents there are.

As an adult, I understand that this is bad behavior but these are kids. They should be punished but I am guessing this is the result of being able to mobilize large groups of people with cell phones. It sounds like a prank that got out of hand.

There is a reason that the school has been called the Dump on the Hump for 75 years. The town does nothing for it and the kids know it.

[Arkansas Granny]

4. WTH is Yokel Land. Did I miss part of this conversation?

[Walk away]

11. That would be places where the almost entire population are white, christian and conservative and

have populations smaller than an East Coast suburban High School. I guess they don't have any in Arkansas. We have them in South West NJ but Arkansas must be a bastion of elite, liberal towns where everyone reads the NYT before breakfast.
Next time I'll be more PC and refer to it as "Rural, insulated, christian right, wingnut" Land.

[Hestia]

16. That's a perceived assessment of a place you have never been and making broad claims

about the people who live here. Yes, the state is divided - blacks in eastern & southern Ark.; whites across northern part of the state and west. But it is not any different that northeastern states where cities are segregated rather than a state - said cities having a larger population that our entire state. Segregation exists everywhere.

If you'd come down and talk to us - spring or fall is the suggested best time, too danged hot in the summer - you'd find that we're pretty much moderate on most things. It's the yahoo's who are getting the media space - as always, even up there - with the rest of us wanting put a gag on the teabaggers. It doesn't help that the "networks" are airing shows where it's okay to laugh at southern white trash dragging the rest of us along with them. (And yes, I said trash, I'm allowed...)

But by and large, we are fairly decent people, a small majority of whom have drank the teabagger/christian Kool-Aide but by no means all! If you'd go and read the history of who are congressmen and senators were (first woman elected to the US Senate), you'd see our socially liberal/moderately fiscal past.

Sorry to the OP for the thread drift - just couldn't let this stand...

[Walk away]

21. One thing you can be sure of. I wasn't referring to Arkansas in my post.

I honestly don't even think of Arkansas at all. It's a big world and it doesn't make the papers much. I'm not into guns in the street so I doubt I'll ever visit.
Teaneck (the town where the incident took place) Is a fully integrated town and has been since it's inception. The black population is also as financially diverse as the white and Asian population. There are very wealthy black families as well as wealthy white families. It was created to be that way. It is not segregated. Here in the North East our cities are generally populated by our most recent immigrants. They more into the suburbs when the next wave comes through.

[Xithras]

3. Sorry, but that's not a prank.

This is a prank:

1. Sneak out of your final senior assembly. You know, the one they hold on the final day of school, where they tell everyone not to goof off at graduation, and that no pranks are allowed.

2. Sneak into the vice principals office.

3. Place a CD with the single of Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy" into her CD player.

4. Press play, and set said track on repeat.

5. Have a trusted compatriot inject Crazy Glue into the office lock.

6. Press the key lock button on the microphone to the school intercom, which is conveniently right next to aforementioned CD player.

7. Close the office door as you run like hell.

You should have seen it...

[KansDem]

14. You rapscallion...you!

[Massacure]

17. Not bad.

I graduated in 2006. Our high school had a hill on one side facing a major road, so we stuck 2006 plastic forks into the lawn. They were arranged to spell out "2006!" no less.

[Xithras]

18. That's what a prank should be

Funny, slightly annoying, but generally nondestructive.

In my case, the school got to listen to "I'm Too Sexy" for 20 minutes until the principal got annoyed enough to flip the breaker and cut power to that office. Acetone fixed the door lock a short while later. No harm, no foul.

In your case, someone had to pick 2006 forks out of a lawn.

My little sister and her friends walked out to the staff parking lot and let all the air out of the administrations tires.

A couple of my friends a year behind me snuck into the staff lot in the middle of the night and repainted the labels on the reserved spaces (Principal, Counselor, Nurse, etc) with funny alternatives (Butt Whipper, Chatterbox, I Love Bandaids!, etc). That's probably about as destructive as I've ever personally seen.

Because the pranks were generally harmless, the administration took them in stride. When my sisters friends let the air out of the tires, they even paid to have a tow truck refill them later that day...and left a note on the principals windshield thanking him and the staff for "four years of fun", letting them know when the truck would be by.

The point of a prank isn't to be destructive, but to be funny.

[Blue_Tires]

5. That's not a prank, that's just fuckwittery....

I'm just surprised that whoever dreamed up this scheme got 60+ people to think it was a good idea...Did someone really leave the door unlocked? or did the kids force it?

And LOL at the adults enabling these special snowflakes:

“They are all good kids,” one mother said as she left the courtroom. “My kid’s going to an Ivy League school,” a father added.

None of the parents would identify themselves, and they made repeated complaints about the overwhelming presence of television crews, reporters and photographers.

“I am just angry right now,” said another woman, who sat in the spectator session of the courtroom. “These students have rights. They should be able to say whether they want to be recorded or not.”

Tristan Anderson, 17, a junior at the school who knows many of the arrested students, said the students made a mistake.

“This does not reflect on Teaneck High School,” he said. “These are good kids, passionate about what they do.” The school district “is considering the consequences it will impose on the students implicated,” Superintendent Barbara Pinsak said in a written statement that she read aloud at the press conference. She said the school has been cleaned up and “teaching continues as we speak.”

Consequences for the students who participated in the prank could be discussed at the Board of Education's meeting on Wednesday, said Gervonn Rice, the board's vice president, who added that the district officials were still gathering information. "We have great kids, but we feel they made a bad choice and got caught up in the moment," Rice told The Record.

[lunasun]

7. I agree !!! with adults like that they have been raised to think they can get away with anything

They are all good kids,” one mother said as she left the courtroom. “ -My kid’s going to an Ivy League school,” a father added.
No shame and enabling

Now will buy their kids something nice since they got caught and had a bad day being 'unfairly arrested' for urinating and other vandalism i bet

[d_legendary1]

6. 62 punks thought this was a good idea?

And the parents are defending them tooth and nail? Had it been me my father would have left me in jail and when they let me out he would have said I hope you learned your lesson.

[Scuba]

8. That's vandalism, not a prank. This is a prank ...

He was premanently expelled, which seems kind of harsh. Everyone else wisely pleaded ignorance.

[mackerel]

9. Those mettling kids....

[Historic NY]

10. Put them to work cleaning up their mess and bar them from graduation ceremony.

[rocktivity]

12. “To go into a school and damage a school, that’s not a prank. That’s criminal mischief”

It's also proof that they're not smart enough to graduate.


rocktivity

[TygrBright]

13. That's not a "prank," just unimaginative juvenile vandalism.

Our senior class prank was MUCH better!

The HS I went to, the Admin offices were a small, separate wing, connected to the main school building by a 6-foot corridor that was windowed floor to ceiling on all sides, and had doors at both ends. However, NO external door directly from the Admin offices-- to get into or out of them, staff had to use that corridor, go out the door to the main hall, and out the adjacent main school entrance.

We filled the corridor, floor to ceiling, with popcorn. Not sayin' how we did it. But we did. Since the door from the main hall opened into the connecting corridor, it was most amusing watching them get it cracked wide enough for the popcorn to start falling out...

Now THAT was a prank!

And the popcorn was relatively easy to clean up.

Talk about smug looks on the faces of seniors at the all-school assembly...

reminiscently,
Bright

[kentauros]

15. The one prank I can remember being somewhat part of

involved a mirror I had helped remove from a bathroom in our field house. A senior friend then took the mirror, and sat with some other friends out on the lawn in front of the same building. They had a direct line of sight to a similar glass-doored hallway that was the only access to the principals' offices. And they shined that mirror through those glass doors on that bright, sunny day, only moving the reflection away when someone approached.

We learned later that in the short hour of shining the sun through the door that they had burnt out the offices' a/c unit. And no one ever found out!

[happyslug]

20. Some Schools go overboard on punishing such pranks, such as expelling students on bicycles:

In 2012, the Seniors of Kenowa Hills High School in western Michigan decided a good last day of school prank was to ride their bicycles to School. They were ALL expelled, but later after everyone protested against the expulsion readmitted and graduated.

http://schoolsofthought.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/23/60-students-sent-home-after-harmless-senior-prank-was-the-principal-in-the-right/

The correct punishment would be to clean up the mess they made, but that does not look like an option anyone is looking into in regards to Teaneck High School’s senior class.