'Two rebel teenagers won': 17-year-old seniors find loophole in school's lateness policy, consistently strolling in between two and three hours late

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Ben Weiss • Writer and Editor
Nov 14, 2024 8:00 AM EST

Immature high school students will always try to find ways to justify playing hooky. It's why the premise of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" has remained relevant, though other elements of that film are most certainly outdated. Regardless, no sane high school student wants to be at school five days a week. It seems that there are three kinds of high school students at the end of the day: the ones who play by the rules, the ones who don't, and the ones who don't but manage to not get caught.

Here, we have a group of rebellious 17-year-old seniors who realized that every student who showed up late to school received a half-hour detention with no further punishment. This meant that if you were one minute late, you had the same exact form of punishment as you would if you were four hours late. These seniors decided to test that theory and spent the subsequent month strolling in several hours late to school and happily receiving just 30 minutes of detention every time.

Eventually, this scheme caught on and the policy was changed, but for that one month, these two students felt like they had cheated the whole system… except for the fact that they still had to go to detention after school every single time, as several folks in the comments section pointed out.

For more stories, take a look at this one about a dad who defended his 16-year-old daughter against her stepsisters.

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    Cheezburger Image 10428062464
    via Unsplash+ (Giulia Squillace)

    This image is for illustration only, and the subjects are models; the image does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • 02
    If you're late to school, you get half an hour of detention
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    This policy was enacted by my high school in my last few years. Once classes started the gates were shut, and if you arrived late, you had to sign in at the office. This
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    gave them a list of kids to pick out at the end of the day, and we would have to sit in detention for half an hour. But it was only ever half an hour- no matter how late you were.
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  • 05
    Cue me and my best friend enjoying our extended lie-ins in the morning, then walking into town to hit up McDonalds or Subway for breakfast, before casually strolling in between two and three hours late, signing in, and just happily accepting the extra half an hour detention at the end of the day.
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    It took them a full MONTH to catch onto us. At which point the late policy was changed and we were given a full week's worth of detention each - which A)
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    absolutely did not make up for the time lost, and B) was well worth it for the best month of high school we'd ever had. It's safe to say the two rebel teenagers won that round.
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  • 08
    nyrB2. when i was going to high school it seemed absenteeism was all they cared about. people were praised just for showing up. i was a bit of a nerd so skipping classes was not something i considered, and at the time the whole thing seemed very confusing to me.
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    cinygirl. From my understanding, states fund district and schools based on attendance percentages. So if attendance is low,
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    less money is given to schools because they don't have a lot of bodies present! Schools need the money though. Kids would show up and do nothing all day to still receive a perfect attendance award at the end of the quarter.
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    NotSoSlenderMan⚫ My school was the same but no penalty for being absent.
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    The power went out in the night once so our alarms didn't go off. My mother drove me to school to sign me in and then the receptionist told me to wait in a chair outside the dean's office so I could get my detention slip.
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    My mother questioned this and was told the policy. She asked what was the consequence for not coming in to school at all and the lady told her there wasn't one. She scratched my name off of the sign in sheet and took me back home for the day.
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    iamthetrippytea What a g. Good moms are out there lol
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    Subterranean Phalanx 2 days ago When I was in high school, they would, after giving in-house detention (basically quarantined away from classes but still doing the required work), they would suspend people after they had a certain number of unexcused absences. I never understood the logic of this. For skipping school,
    via Vio_Amethyst
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    the punishment was ... not being able to attend even if you were inclined. The handful of people I knew who did this just hung out with older friends and basically were on vacation during that month
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    or whatever. I guess the idea was that if you got suspended you'd be failing your classes and have to repeat them and not graduate on time, but if you've got a chronic absentee, do you really think they're that concerned about their academic record? At least a couple
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    of them dropped out and got their GEDs later, so at some point they got the diploma, but I still don't see how suspension was considered "punishment." This was the late '80s so things may have changed. I hope so. Chronic absenteeism is usually an indicator of other issues so I hope it's being more holistically addressed now.
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    Won't lie though, I'd have loved to skip out on boring classes, but in a small town that's hard, because unless I was being driven around in the trunk of someone's car, my parents would have heard about it before I even got home. We didn't have AP classes and I was rarely challenged. I stuck it out though,
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    and moved 2,500 miles away at my earliest opportunity, and was happy, so playing their game and playing the long game worked out. TL;DR: is suspending a kid from school actually punishment when the kid is out doing whatever they want?
    via Vio_Amethyst
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    TheInfiniteSix. Upvoted for being malicious compliance but I don't really know why you're bragging about skipping school. I
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    assure you most adults don't find this super cool and edgy, if anything I'm just lumping you into all the people I knew who cut class a lot. Those people were....not great.
    via Vio_Amethyst

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school high school student students malicious compliance kids teenagers malicious-compliance-reddit kids these days high school reddit thread Reddit immature high schoolers
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