By Samantha Connelly.
For decades senior pranks have been a tradition in American high schools. From parking lot cookouts, mariachi bands, to sticky notes seniors come up with quirky, clever, and harmless pranks for their last days of high school. At least they should be harmless. This year the Abilene High seniors had the brilliant idea of egging, throwing toilet paper on trees, and spray-painting profanities across the school for their final days of school. In response, the majority of those involved were suspended, banned from senior activities, and required to pay a fee to walk at graduation. This tradition has turned into an excuse for vandalism and even though tradition can be fun, the exploitation of these innocent plans should be put to an end, and senior pranks should no longer be allowed throughout America.
Since the turn of the century senior pranks have continuously been getting more popular and more extravagant. Recently a high school in South Carolina had their seniors dismissed from the graduation ceremony due to vandalism that included shaving cream, chocolate syrup, hand sanitizer, feminine pads, and more. Pranks such as these call into question whether senior pranks have just developed into excuses for vandalism.
Some schools allow senior pranks requiring students to clean their mess afterwards. However, many pranks result in excessive cleaning for janitors and staff. It is not a janitor’s job to clean a mess that almost-adults thought would be funny to do. On social media high schoolers can be seen dropping hundreds of papers down stairways or silly string, etc. Senior pranks began decades ago when, in their final days of high school, seniors’ boredom drove them to begin “pranking” their schools. There are many other activities that seniors could do, like group activities, sparing the staff from gigantic clean up jobs. Some might argue that senior pranks are a harmless and fun tradition, however in far too many instances these pranks are a nuisance. Banning them is long overdue.
Ending your last weeks of high school spent by proving to the older generations that our dead-beat generation will never be anything more than egging and graffiti goes against what we’ve been trying to prove for years. Our generation is capable of so much success that generations before us do not understand and by vandalizing and being childish causes us to regress from our progress.
