The dumbest rule that fortunately was only “tried” to be enforced was no gun racks in the student vehicles in the parking lot. This is was a rural area where for almost a hundred years people would have guns in the gun-racks in their trucks mostly. But with fire arm thefts etc it was pretty rare to actually have a gun loaded or unloaded in the gun-rack. Generally you’d just have the gun in the rack if you were hunting, or patrolling your ranch or whatever.

Then Columbine happened and suddenly gun-racks and leather trench coats, aka dusters, another extremely common piece of clothing in a rural ranching town were priority number one by reactionary’s. Hundreds of otherwise lawful students were suspended, ticketed, arrested etc and finally after several months I assume someone had a “are we the baddies?” moment, and coupled with hundreds of lawsuits, the school system got a new superintendent and suddenly gun racks and dusters were back to being treated as the mundane items they are.

“Zero tolerance” policy on fighting. Any “active” participation resulted in automatic suspension. That part sounds fine, but active participation included things like holding up your hands in self defense or trying to push the person sitting on your chest while punching you in the face off of you.

A couple got caught behind the high school. Girl giving the blowie was made to apologize to the school over the PA system and then “encouraged” to go to a different school where she would “fit in better”. Boy got no punishment.

Back when I was in high school (in public school), chess caught on in a big way. Chess. It was the weirdest thing. It was a public school in a small farming town, and pre-Nerd Renaissance, so picture a stereotypical 80s or 90s school where jocks were top of the food chain–and then picture those same jocks in their letter jackets rushing to the library on their free periods to take turns playing chess. They set up tournaments and kept track of win/loss ratios and talked about chess strategies in the hallways.

So obviously something had to be done…I guess? The school started making rules and posting them around the school: one game per student per day. One game at a time in the lounge. No chess in classrooms or in the library! The chess board must be returned to the lounge supervisor between games, then signed out by the next person wanting to play–not just passed willy-nilly from one student to another! No outside chess boards allowed!

That pretty much strangled the chess fad. The jocks went back to stuffing nerds in lockers and sneaking out to smoke behind the school, and the chess boards returned to the shelf by the lounge supervisor, where they collected dust.

Problem…solved? The whole thing was pretty surreal.