Perhaps the most diabolical crimes against school policy are the gregarious senior pranks. The kind, well-meaning majority of seniors try to give back at the end of their high-school career to the student body in which they learned about the world around them. Yet there remains a select few, unruly group of students that out of their twisted cognitive processes find joy in wasting the time and emotion of teachers, staff, and fellow students. What follows is merely a taste of the many vicious shenanigans. PVC Pipes- 2007 Substitute teacher Dave Duit personally witnessed a highly complex and nefarious senior prank. “Seniors from a physics class put together a structure made of PVC pipe. The PVC pipes were slanted slightly. As long as the teachers disassembled it in the right order, no paint would spill. And it was temper paint, which is easy to clean.” He says. Some wonder if this prank was the real reason for the future changes to the physics teachers and curriculum. Perhaps the force diagrams and velocity graphs caused something to snap in once innocent and bright young minds. One wonders what fateful career these students adopted. This prank is not to be confused with the copycat crime of 2008 which was similar in concept as a PVC structure that was filled with paint. Stair Rails- 1980 Mr. Gary Huston recalls a prank in which the rails leading down the stairway to the front lobby were removed. “It disappeared for a few days. Someone would sneak in the school in some way and take the bolts off it. It disappeared for a good week one year” With the railing removed, the stairs were transformed from a pleasant location for conversation and traversing to a desolate mine field comparable to that of a Himalayan cliff-side. Imagine the ensuing chaos as 300 students force themselves up and down a staircase in 5 minutes without any means to catch on to anything in a moment of slippage. To think that the student body was able to survive without the stair rails for not only one class period, but for an entire week reveals the underlying stamina of Ames High’s former students.