What are your thoughts on the practice of graduating high school seniors pulling some kind of dramatic 'prank' before the end of the year? Is this something that should be punished harshly, the same way it would if the kids were in any other grade or if it were at any other time in the year? Or is it just harmless fun? Does it depend on the type of prank? Is this something that you did when you were a senior, and if so, what were the ramifications?
The reason I ask is that the senior pranks in Kuwait always tend to go quite overboard, at least by American standards. Discipline is uniformly lax at almost all of the private schools in Kuwait, in no small part because the students are mostly quite wealthy and many of their parents have a significant amount of 'wasta' (influence) in the government. In fact, a few years back, at a school near the one where I worked, there was a principal who gave a boy an in-school suspension for fighting with another student on school grounds, and his father ended up becoming irate, when to the Ministry of Education and had her charged with 'illegally detaining' his son, and when the principal tried to board a plane to fly home for the summer, she found out that she wasn't allowed to leave. She ended up being detained in the country for several months before international pressure forced her to be released. Anyway, that's a total side-note, but it's back-story that helps explain why the following types of pranks are possible:
I've already mentioned that for both of the two years I worked in Kuwait, the senior 'prank' involved students purchasing mice and chicks that had been died pink and blue and green and releasing them in the halls and in people's lockers (where many of them went on to die of heat stroke and dehydration). Needless to say, I never found this to be terribly funny. There was also quite a bit of pulling of fire alarms during the last week or so of school.
Anyway, I just found out from one of my former fellow teachers (she still works at the school) through Facebook that the seniors this year decided to 'up the ante.' They dressed up as 'terrorists' (I guess they wore face masks and stuff) and ran through the halls, squirting teachers and other students with squirt guns and throwing eggs at them. A lot of the elementary school kids (the elementary and high school are in the same building) thought this was a real threat, and ended up crying as their teachers tried to console them. Many teachers got egged, and the principal and vice principal ended up locking themselves in their office to protect themselves.
Apparently, now the entire building reeks of eggs, and of course the mess has been left for the maid staff (most of whom are from the Philippines and Sri Lanka, all of whom are woefully underpaid) to clean up.
When I read this I was shocked and appalled. But I'm sure that if I talked to the girls who did this they would all say it was harmless fun. So, where do you draw the line? And what do you think would be an appropriate response in a situation like this? (These kids are all set to graduate, anyway, so it's not like a suspension is going to bother them too much at this point.)
By the time I got there it was watered down, cleared with the dean and police in advance, etc. But we still had fun 
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