Recent TP-ing incident highlights school’s tough senior prank policy

In light of the recent senior prank in which students TP-ed the entire campus on May 4, the policies surrounding senior pranks have become of extreme importance.

According to assistant principal Kevin Mount, the administration reminds seniors every spring that there is a “zero tolerance” policy for senior pranks of any kind in order to prevent damage to the school and extra work for the custodians.

The minimal consequence for those responsible for a senior prank is not being allowed to walk at graduation. A further repercussion, which is determined based on the extremity of the prank, could include suspension.

So far, no consequences have been given for the most recent prank because the administration has been unable to determine who is responsible.

"We don’t know who did it; there’s no evidence that we have seen that it is even our students,” Mount said. “It could be someone else from another school.”

According to Mount, the most irritating part of the latest prank is the “lack of thoughtfulness about the human impact.”

The school has spent significant hours getting a lift out to the quad to clean the toilet paper, ironically during Staff Appreciation Week, and given the nature of the prank, it is a liability issue to allow students to climb ladders and lifts to participate in a cleanup.

The TP-ing is similar, though milder in nature than a prank done at San Lorenzo Valley High, the school Mount previously taught at. According to Mount, some boys at that school pushed a broken-down car into the community pool for their senior prank, and time and resources had to be spent that could have been “better allocated for learning and teaching.”

In that particular case, it cost the community $4,000 to get a crane to the school to remove the car, which had sunk to the bottom of the pool, in addition to more time and money to drain and scrub the pool.

Mount, however, said that senior pranks have not been a tradition at Saratoga High in recent times, and the last one happened more than three years ago.

“We have a very good history of students being mindful and thoughtful about their behavior,” Mount said. “That says a lot about our kids and the community.”