• Jarlsburg@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    48
    ·
    1 day ago

    I caused ~$100k damage to my middle school.

    I am going to fuzz some of the details for obvious reasons, but when I was in 8th grade, I was dealing with a chaotic home life and had just moved for the 3rd time in 8 years across the country. I hated the school and didn’t really have friends so developed some destructive habits.

    Our physical education teacher was a lazy, creepy, moron who would force us to run laps for an hour which let him sit in his office. He’d berate kids and give them mean racist nicknames and if you refused he would give you an F for your midpoint report which meant you couldn’t participate in any other sport or extracurricular activity the school sponsored. The class was half the grade at a time so it was over a hundred kids including the disabled kids and sometimes would just leave us unsupervised for an hour. At one point he crudely encouraged on two kids with downs syndrome make out, which they did while he watched and laughed and made fun of them. Just an evil spiteful man.

    So before and after class we had 15 minutes to get ready so I would go around the locker room and find anything that would fit in a toilet and flush it. Towels, clothes, backpacks, food, pencils, paper - all of it in the toilet. They had insane flush power so would violently suck it all down and I thought it was just funny. I did it off and on for a month.

    One day we heard gym was cancelled and then the school was cancelled the next day because of a facilities issue. Apparently the gym flooded pretty badly. We had to start having gym outside. Then after a couple weeks we had a school wide assembly and the superintendent was there and explained that a group of people had been flushing stuff down the toilet and they had to do a massive, emergency plumbing project that cost them $100k+. They were super mad and told us they already knew almost everyone who did it but if you come forward you won’t get expelled. Yeah, sure.

    Anyway, I had no friends and no one knew I was doing it so I just didn’t say anything and got away with it. Also, a few years later the gym teacher was fired allegedly for some sexual misconduct issue.