In the middle of first period on May 27, the loudspeakers crackled to life as senior ISU co-president Anton Jordan shouted into the microphone. His message was about construction: allegedly, there was a new team on campus that would be working to fix problems all throughout the day. Students were warned to avoid areas marked with yellow construction tape and report any unsupervised sites. 

This new team was made up of WIS seniors only – a crew bent on wreaking havoc and pranking the school halls. All throughout the morning, seniors dressed in construction vests and hard hats milled around campus, hosing down buildings, interrupting classes, making drilling noises with hammers and clipboards, barring entrances to buildings and inspecting invisible problems in classrooms.

When students arrived at school earlier that morning, it was immediately clear that Senior Prank Day 2025 was going to be memorable. The construction theme was apparent, with bright yellow construction tape and neon orange construction vests lining floors, tables and doors around campus. Jordan, who helped organize the day, said that the theme was an easy pick. 

“The construction has always been such a running joke of sorts in our grade,” Jordan said.  “[The joke is] that it’ll never end, and the field will never return, and we thought it would be rather entertaining to mimic it. With hard hats and construction vests already on campus, it was an easy choice.”

The pranks themselves were less easy to coordinate, as the school has relatively strict rules with regard to safety.

“Many of our intended pranks often violated campus security, fire ordinances, or simply created too much waste,” Jordan said. “It took a while to settle on some solid ideas that would create a bit of chaos and annoyance without affecting the day-to-day of the school.”

The process of working around these ideas entailed brainstorming with faculty to determine what was feasible and safe.

“Planning involved a lot of working with the administration,” Jordan said. “You’d be surprised how much approval and thinking ahead goes into Prank Day.”

This year’s planning process went very smoothly, according to senior Sofía Vakis, who also helped organize the event.

“We were the first grade to ever have all of the pranks approved,” Vakis said. “None of our ideas were shut down!”

Even Head of School Suzanna Jemsby was in on it, sending out a prank email announcing a two-year delay on completion of the new building.

“Unfortunately, due to a parasitic infestation of raccoons in LCB over the weekend, we are faced with the difficult decision of extending the construction deadline,” Jemsby wrote in her Tuesday-morning email to students. “The raccoons have eaten through the vital piping and wiring which has already resulted in a poor WiFi connection this morning.”

Vakis approached Jemsby to coordinate the prank email. 

“[Sofía Vakis] came to my office and we played with a draft,” Jemsby said. “We wanted it to be slightly plausible, but mostly clearly a joke.”

One of the more disruptive pranks was the collection of teetering towers of chairs and desks in classrooms. This prank was appreciated by many, including Jordan.

“My favorite prank would definitely be Renzo’s ‘classroom constructions,’” Jordan said. “He managed to put the tables and chairs together into giant knots, which were then wrapped in our construction tape. He managed to do this in at least five or six classrooms, on his own for the most part, which was insanely impressive.”

The day also reminded some teachers of the pranks that they carried out themselves as seniors. Biology teacher Sabrina Hoong shared a story about one messy prank that was a tradition at her school.

“When I was a student, we had a mud bath in the middle of campus, and we would drag teachers out of their classrooms,” Hoong said.

The chaos didn’t end there – teachers were ambushed again after emerging from the mud.

“We had water guns too, so after the mud bath, we would spray them down,” Hoong said.

Though the tradition was somewhat intrusive, Hoong recalls that it was widely accepted because it was a custom at her school: teachers knew to come prepared.

“Because it was a school tradition, they would always know to bring an extra set of clothes to wear after,” Hoong said.

Economics teacher Aaron Butler also participated in senior pranks at his school, though his prank was tidier.

“In my time, we had computer labs,” Butler said. “I screenshotted the desktops of the computers in the labs and set them as screensavers. Then I deleted the app icons, so whenever people tried opening apps, they would just click on the desktop.”

Butler’s school had a long-standing history of dramatic pranks. 

“There was also an urban legend at my school that some people disassembled the principal’s car and put the pieces around school,” Butler said.

Pranks have become less and less extreme over the years as schools clamp down on regulations to help keep Senior Prank Day under control. 

“Good pranks are easy to think of, and hard to get approved,” Jordan said.

By Tindra Jemsby