Recently Reddit user asked the community: “What was the most that happened at your school?”
Well, folks didn’t hold anything back and revealed some pretty shocking and downright disturbing incidents from their school days. Like…after reading them, I couldn’t believe it.
So, here are some of the most shocking things people witnessed back in school:
Note: Some submissions include topics of sexual assault, verbal abuse, grooming, firearms, child abuse, and drug abuse. Please proceed with caution.
1.“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.’ But my mother was being convinced to transfer me, as the teacher I actually had was said to be bit lazy and always dirty. 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).”
2.“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.”
3.“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.”
4.“In high school, three people got raided by armed police (all unrelated cases). This was around the time Silk Road (2021) came out, so they were all importing large amounts of MDMA, LSD, and cocaine. I did go to a private school though so honestly not that surprising, wasn’t even the most illegal thing to happen there.”
5.“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 5th 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.”
6.“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.”
7.“The Varsity Captain, Varsity Co-Captain, and the Junior Varsity Captain robbed the pizza place next to my after-school job. They murdered someone I knew who worked there. One of them worked there, and they planned to stage a fake robbery (the other two being the robbers and ‘forcing’ him to open the safe and registers). The shooter was in my psychology class, and all week our teacher would make sure we were doing okay. This happened in the strip mall closest to our high school, so dozens of juniors and seniors worked in the varying businesses there. The shooter would make comments like, ‘Damn, I hope they get him.'”
“One day (maybe that same week even) the police came to school and I’ll never forget how I felt in this moment. The shooter was called to the office during our class — he just stood up, gathered his backpack, smiled at all of us, and said something like, ‘Well, that’s that,’ or ‘about time’ (something that hinted at admission).
Pretty sure I remember they canceled a bunch of games; the joke in town was, ‘Oooh don’t play ______ High. They have a killer football team.'”
8.“I went to a private school, and right before my senior year started, it was discovered that one of the top administrators had been stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the school. He was arrested, and we had a new set of principles or whatever the title was on the first day of school.”
9.“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…'”
10.“A kid got beaten to death in my school — we were locked down for four hours. He was life flighted and died a few days later. The kid who killed him ran away from the school, but they ended up catching him. He only got 20 years probation and is now a successful real estate agent, and everyone kind of forgot about it.”
11.“At my middle school the school priest [was a pedophile] and also the basketball coach. In the middle of my 8th-grade year, he suddenly (without any warning) got moved to another Catholic school in an inner-city neighborhood on the other side of the state. He wasn’t brought to justice for over two decades, and was still at that same school when he was finally arrested.”
12.“My music teacher was fucking unhinged — he literally threatened to kill students for misbehaving. The school discouraged me from reporting him because they didn’t want to go through the legal paperwork of doing so. They eventually fired him after a year, but the damage was already done.”
13.“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 laugh to 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).”
14.“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 him). It hit him in the chest, and luckily not his heart. He lived, but it traumatized me.”
15.“One of the coaches would make passes at a lot of girls, and he would also smoke weed with kids in the locker rooms. He kept a metal bowl poking out the top of his sock…we could literally all see it all the time. He was the coach for a long-ass time, too.”
16.“A teacher got accused of grooming and sexual assault. The allegation was brought to light that two other teachers throughout the school’s history had also sexually abused students. Two of the three teachers are dead now, and the other one is in jail.”
17.“It’s so hard to pick just one. We had the gender-neutral bathrooms become a ‘brothel,’ a math teacher dated a junior, the vice principal slept with multiple students, a social studies teacher who was a drug addict punched his boss in the face during class. And, one of the women in the main office got busted as a cocaine dealer.”
18.“Our principal invited the cheerleaders to a pool party at his house and set up a camera in the bathroom where he told them to change.”
19.“The police searched a student’s car in the school parking lot and found his girlfriend’s dead body in the trunk. If that doesn’t count because the murder happened off of school grounds, it was a whole ring of people doing tattoos and piercings that ended up getting infected.”
20.“On a school trip a girl had a stillbirth after telling no one she was pregnant. We traveled on a plane (which likely killed her baby), and then she tried to cover up the dead fetus in the hotel trash. A few students were in on it. I don’t know her name, but it was in the news sometime in 2011 (it’s the same high school where the world’s current strongest man is from).”
21.And: “There was a huge orgy when I was 14 — a bunch of other 13-year-old 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.”
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.
