October 19, 2020

If you happened to be in or around Spring Lake [High School] for any amount of time during the last two weeks, chances are you’ve probably heard about the spat of homecoming pranks we’ve had. Toilet papering, saran-wrapping cars, and apparently even throwing watermelons on someone’s lawn. However, there was one issue with all this: we took it too far.

Now, I severely doubt there has ever been a high school that hasn’t had to deal with homecoming pranks. Pranks in high school are just a way of life. Seniors mess up all the classrooms on the last day of school, we sometimes exchange pranks with Fruitport before a big game, you know how it is. The issue is, if we need to get the superintendent, the school staff in charge of announcements, and, in some isolated cases, the police, to tell us to calm it down, we have a slight issue.

The main issue is that the line of discussion in the school around the punishments that have been handed out is that the punishments seem to be “out of the blue”. Students aren’t exactly sure what’s going to happen to them and this year seems more harsh than anything else that has been previously used. Therefore, the school has a clear solution in front of it: give the students a reason to not go overboard on homecoming pranks.

This is a very simplistic solution to the problem, yes, but its simplicity is its greatest strength. If you know that you will be burned by placing your hand on a hot surface, you won’t do it, or at least you have no reason to take that course of action. The same logic applies here.

In conclusion, the school has a golden opportunity to stop the homecoming pranks and their consequences. Now, it just needs to be communicated.