Here’s the first installment of what will become a regular feature around here. The precise reason that education in the USA is in a major decline compared to the rest of the planet is that the administrators we allow to reign are insipid, vapid, stupid assholes. Some have good intentions, to be sure, but when an idiot approaches you with the intention of helping you, I’d advise a flight response. Run away. Quickly.

I’m sure some will be appalled at my broad stroke which paints all school administrators as lacking in even the basic intelligence of the typical parakeet, and it’s true. I’m certain that there are some who do have some water flowing over the rocks in their head, even a few who are actually smart. But, you know, if you have a bag of tomatoes and most of them are rotting, it’s a nasty exercise to go through them all to find the couple of good ones.
Here’s the latest: A high school senior in Ohio wanted to prank his peers at a rival school. Nothing new there. And in today’s world, we hear too frequently of these pranks being quite mindless and definitely going too far, to the point of physical injury or vandalism.
This was not one of those cases. Here we have a student who heard of similar pranks and set about figuring out how to make it work, successfully coming up with a plan of execution. The prank was well thought out, posed no threat of injury or vandalism, and was truly clever.
He mapped out the relevant stadium sections and, using colored construction paper, passed out the paper to the 800+ fans in those sections. The fans thought that when they held up the paper, it would spell “Go Darby”, but it actually said “We Suck”. To me, that’s pretty much a brass ring in terms of senior H.S. pranks. Well played, Kyle Garchar, well played.
His principal, John Bandow, did not agree. Mr. Garchar, his girlfriend, and another friend of his who helped with the prank were sentenced to in-school suspension (fancy new term for detention). Not only that, but they are prohibited from any extracurricular school activities for the rest of the semester. Of course, for a graduating senior, this has a certain final quality to it. Hope they’ve already had the Junior-Senior Prom.
Ahh well. Mr. Garchar is heading to California after graduation to study engineering. And if there’s one thing shared by all good engineering schools is a love of (or at least a high tolerance for) good, well thought out pranks.
Another report of this story contains this gem:

Hilliard schools spokeswoman Michelle Wray said she couldn’t confirm the punishment because the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act forbids the release of student disciplinary information.

Of course not. Not only do school administrations get away with ludicrous acts of self-evident pathology, but they have federal laws to help them avoid having to justify and speak about their stupidity to the general public.
Here’s the video from Youtube: