It’s understandable that some competition among schools and different classes is healthy, but have students taken it too far?

Riverside Brookfield High School, in Illinois, has a tradition which crossed the line this year. Each year, the students T.P. the campus in the week before homecoming.

This year the Homecoming vandalism at Riverside Brookfield High cost $3500 in damages due to the unnecessarily extreme prank. Parts of the school were spray painted, and there were live chickens left on campus. It became more than just the customary toilet papering of the school.

Traditions like this are valued only if the students know their limits. Our own upper classmen took the clash of the classes to extensive lengths and as a result lost to the juniors; although some could argue that they were the ones who deserved to win.

Our school is not the only one with traditions taken too extremely. The “junior-senior Prank Wars” are what the students at Lafayette High School used to look forward to each year, until it led to the arrest of some of the students. The students put brownie mix on top of cars, threw eggs on the roofs, and fired paint balls at the homes around the campus.

Playing pranks used to be fun and didn’t involve causing damage to public property. There used to be limit at which people knew to stop, but unfortunately high school pranks have been taken passed that limit.

Schools need to emphasize the rules for the competitions and pranks to avoid situations like these. In order to keep traditions like this, we need to understand the consequences and learn to know how far is too far.