> :p Lucky. Our 'senior trip' was one day. No overnight. Of course, the no overnight was wholly the fault of the senior class that came before us, who generally ransacked and destroyed the place, making the school administrators fear for all time. Grrr.

Ah, yes, the customary prank taken too far. When i was in sixth grade, the senior class of what would be my high school pulled off the last official senior prank IHS ever allowed. It had been a yearly custom for the seniors to graduate the Sunday before exam week, do their campus prank and be gone on the senior trip before Monday morning.

But not after that class. One of their moms worked at a local bank, so they saved trash bags full of shredded paper in preparation for that night. What they did was stack the desks to the ceiling in the middle of each classroom, saran-wrapped, then fill EVERY room with shredded paper and hay. Since the pastor (it was a church school) and the high school principal/youth minister both had allergies, they ALSO put paper shavings and hay in the air ducts.

The high school classes all met in the gym that Monday, while they cleaned out the upstairs. The paper was dumped out a second-story window (all the high school classrooms were on that floor; the first floor was the church's day-care ministry) into a dump truck which then carried it all off for disposal (the truck was filled up at least twice before it was all gone).

Our pastor considered almost had the highway patrol stop the bus and bring the senior class back, except that MS state law considers any reported crime one against the state itself, so the state would have pursued criminal prosecution even if official charges were dropped by the school itself. So they had their senior trip.

The school officially stated that no future pranks on campus by students would be tolerated, and, should another take place, that the high school would be closed down because it would have proven itself ineffective as one of the church's ministries. Also, future senior classes had to stay through exam week to graduate, and transportation for their trips would not be provided by the school.

Many of the seniors' parents, members of the church, felt the school reacted too harshly and actually split from the church over the incident.

The next year, on the anniversary Monday of that prank (and i did not learn this until years afterward), a bale of hay was left in front of the high school entrance. The pastor, arriving early, simply disposed of it before any students began arriving.

Oh, and the senior class trip? Well, let's just say their trip to Florida took a while. As things turned out, the seniors weren't the only pranksters that night. The 10th-grade Home Economics class (of which my older sister was part) provided food for the reception following the sunday-night graduation. One of their desserts was "haystacks," which consist of small clumps of chow mein noodles with chocolate or peanut butter poured and dried over them.

A separate tray of these haystacks was fixed particularly for the seniors which substituted Ex-Lax for regular chocolate. What REALLY made the joke effective is that one of the male graduates took great liking to these and had several. Their bus had to stop at least every hour on the way to their Florida destination.

Penny*is still wary of my sister's haystacks*stamp