Memorial Day Memories

Good leaders are proactive, right? Why wait for trouble? Head it off at the pass....show the community that you are in charge.  Good advice to any new leader....

During the spring of my first year as principal in 2005, I met with the senior class on their first day back from Easter vacation.  Aware of the recent history of pranks that were upsetting to the faculty and problematic to our public image, I met with the seniors and shared with them my concern about denying seniors the chance to walk at graduation based upon their behavior.  I wanted to spare their parents the anguish of such a decision, so I encouraged the seniors to strongly consider this and to NOT do anything stupid before graduation.


Graduation came and went with no pranks.  What a smart guy! What an outstanding leader! Everyone walked, everyone was happy, life was good.

Until....Memorial day evening, 2005.  Yes, the seniors had listened quite well.  They didn't do anything before graduation, so they all got to walk.  Unfortunately, they were smart enough to recognize the fact that if they did something AFTER graduation, I had minimal leverage to punish.  In other words, the safest time to pull a prank was when they were graduates and no longer seniors.....

I returned home from northern Michigan on the night of Memorial day 2005, blissfully unaware of what was to come.  Five hours on I-75 that evening, all I wanted was a good night's sleep before the last week of school.  I hit the sack around midnight expecting a good 7 hours sleep.   And then the phone rang at 2:30pm and the caller asked me if I was the principal of Brother Rice.  I answered yes, groggily, wondering what it could be.  The voice on the other end of the line brought a sudden end to my semi-conscious state when I was informed that the Bloomfield Township police were at the school and I needed to get there as soon as possible.

When I got to the school, I was shocked to see seven police cars in the parking lot, each one with a recent   graduate handcuffed in the backseat.  Can you say turkey shoot? Police 7, graduates 0.  (I found out later that one graduate avoided capture and ran home in the middle of the night, so I guess the score was really 7-1.)  Their crime? They left a few mice, a few crickets, and a lot of candy (yes candy) that spelled out statements such as Greetings from the Class of 2005.  A tough bunch, eh? Hardened criminals? Hardly.  But they were in custody because they had been in our building without permission. 

For the record, they didn't break anything.  They put a ladder on the roof, jumped into the courtyard and got in through one of the interior windows that was open.  We would have gotten them eventually as the building is videotaped, but the drama of the moment was that their laughter had woken up the neighbors and they were handcuffed by the time I got there.  I wasn't exactly in a position to say let them go, nor do I think the police would have appreciated that given their efforts.  It was a harmless prank, but when you're trespassing at 2am in a school, you've got a problem when the police show up.

Demonstrating either historic naivete or stupidity or both, one of the grads had actually videotaped the entire event.  Once this was discovered, the police on site enjoyed their discovery with a degree of humor that I suspect that graduates will never forget.  As if being caught red handed wasn't bad enough, there was further visual evidence if necessary.  Thankfully, there was no damage.  In fact, these grads admittedly loved the school and would never have done harm.

They did, however, want to have some fun.  Surprise! Ever heard of unintended consequences? The police took them to the station at around 3:30am, processed them and then called their parents and released them sometime between 4 and 5am.  One sat in a jail cell with an individual who had been arrested that evening for attempted murder.  Don't think they'll ever forget that night, even though we laugh about it today.  Their parents were mortified and the grads were horribly embarrassed.  One of the parents reportedly asked his son upon picking him up at the jail what he intended to study in college.  The shocked grad, completely taken aback by the first words from his dad, asked why he would ask such a question.  The dad replied that it had better not be criminal justice because he was clearly a horrible failure as a criminal....

Their penalty? I dropped the charges (Breaking and entering - a felony!) and instead assigned community service.  I wasn't really angry with them, though I was upset that I lost out on a night of sleep!  After the police dog was summoned to search the building one last time (no kidding), and the police finally left around 4:30am, I spent an additional hour or so trying to capture the few white mice.  Thought I got them all, but of course, I wasn't given a manifest/inventory of the count ahead of time.  Naturally, two were undiscovered by me - one ended up in Coach Kal's class and the other was discovered in the women's rest room.  Neither made a very good choice...