Those darn kids and their acts of youthful rebellion

On the way home from work last night, I heard a story about students at an Indiana middle school staging a planned food fight last week. Apparently several students orchestrated the “event”, prompted no doubt by one-too-many servings of chicken fried steak. So after the fracas, there was about $1,000 in costs incurred by the school for cleaning costs and overtime. Apparently, mashed potatoes are a bitch to get off ceiling tiles.

Because of this story though, I now know that I’m a grownup. When I was younger, I would have totally rooted for the kids. I always dreamed of having food fights when I was in elementary school, to the point where I told stories about school-sanctioned ones occurring in my Fargo, ND kindergarten to classmates in my new elementary school after we moved there. I told these stories so often that I honestly started to believe them, and in fact only really questioned that story’s validity when I sat down to start typing this*.

But now that I’m older I find myself feeling sorry for the custodial staff who had to stick around for hours afterwards cleaning up spoiled milk and gravy everywhere. My question is why not have the kids clean up the mess? Just lock the doors and give everyone mops, sponges and buckets? Who cares whether the kids cleaning were the ones who actually threw stuff? If you just make everyone clean, then the innocent kids will dream up their own punishments for those who weren’t. And believe me, the punishments the kids mete out will be much worse than anything the principal could have imagined; kind of like mob justice, really.

So now I’m wondering what other famous stories from my youth I completely imagined. Maybe I never knifed that neighbor girl after all…

* Essentially, the logic behind my story just didn’t add up – there’s no way the school would have trashed an entire cafeteria and let kids stain whatever clothes they were wearing that day with grape juice and milk but not go home early.

Comments

towwas said…
I can't think of any story I used to tell that wasn't true, but I remember a couple of news stories that totally freaked me out disproportionately. The one that really affected me for years was one about a little kid who'd been shot in front of his house in a drive-by. For ages I was afraid to walk from the car to the house - it wasn't until many years later that it occurred to me that this kid probably didn't live in a neighborhood like mine.
ThatIsMeWhat said…
Yeah i totally agree with your change of view assessment. I wish there could be consequence free food fights all the time!
Jay Noel said…
They can't make the kids clean it up, because one of the kids' parents will sue the school for child labor law infractions.