Did you attend a bad school?

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Whether it was an elementary, middle school, high school, or college/university, was your school considered to be a bad school?

I just graduated from an extremely ghetto high school. The high school I went to has had a bad reputation for years, mostly due to gangs and fights and stuff like that. The school was pretty bad. The students were overwhelmingly economically disadvantaged, and the school also had the highest teen pregnancy rates in the city--it was totally normal to see pregnant students walking through the halls. Not only that, but there were a lot of fights and disruptive students. I had, on several occasions, seen students get arrested on campus.

Does anybody else have any horror stories to share about their alma mater?

Oh ya, plenty of them though the last one wasn't nearly as bad. Lucky me I was the odd one out socially and no one ever messed with me in high school, but being in an unstructured environment like that wreaked havoc on my grades and my attitude.

If you don't mind sharing (since I stay in the DFW area as well), who was your alma mater?

I went to Sam Houston High School, in Arlington.

My high school, while not the worst, was certainly an experience. I had two teachers who were openly psychotic, one teacher who was a chronic liar, a workshop teacher who once cut his own thumb off and a principle who was busted for drunk driving. I've also had a classmate who was busted for drug dealing, and several who got pregnant at an early age.

At least it makes for fun stories

Yes. It was a rural area and the school was full of bullies.

I always thought that rural high schools were be good schools.

I went to a high school with a terrible reputation. It was kids who were in trouble with the law, kicked out of other schools, etc. We had one autistic girl who just needed a school who could cater to her needs. I went because I had too many absences for other schools.

Not the case with this one. LOL. (PunkyKat is my old user name. I lost my password). I wasn't there for high school but always heard from my older brothers and people I knew that it was pretty bad. The principal picked on a girl to the point she committed suicide. If the grade school was so bad, I don't think the high school was any better.

Been to 4 schools. Two primary, 1 secondary for 6 months and the fourth school was a special school for girls with communication problems (autism etc).

Third school was awful. Was severely bullied and was excluded because the school utterly did the most sickening safeguarding.


Fourth school was great from a social point of view. I had loads of friends, they understood my needs alot better. Education was lacking and frustrating at times which led me to do attention seeking things like getting into trouble. Manipulating people, playing staff of by each other.

I went to 4th grade at a skewl my mom started teaching at that year. It was a in a low income Louisiana swamp area. I was bullied alot physically & emotionally. In the middle of the year our teacher left at Christmas time to have surgery on her jaw. We had a new teacher for the rest of the year. The sub was worse & one day in line a bully told her I spit on his face. I may of accidentally spit when I talked cuz I did do that occasionally but I really believed I did not at the time. I got sent to the principal & he asked why I spit on the bully's face. I told him I didn't & he asked well why the the teacher say you did. I told him because the bully told her I did. He called me a smart aleck & then brought me to my class to grab all my stuff. He then brought me to my mom's class & had a meeting with her outside. I spent the rest of the day in my mom's class & didn't have class at the skewl again. I went to my grandparents for a month & watched TV & stuff while my parents were at work(there was about a month left to the skewl year when that incident whet down & my mom was off during the summer). That skewl only went to 4th grade & I was passed to the next grade & heard from my mom that it wasn't considered a suspension & they did that to protect me but I'm not sure about that. I think they did that to get rid of me cuz I was a problem kid with disabilities & they didn't want to cause too much controversy or anything. I'm glad that incident happened in a way because I got to miss a month of skewl

My mom had a lot of problems with that skewl as a teacher but there's a lot & I'm not sure that I should really get into my mom's experiences in this thread.

Was it considered a bad school? No. However, was it a bad school? Yes.

My secondary school had wonderful reviews from inspectors, but inspections can be incredibly deceiving. I consider OFSTED inspections to sometimes be a test that shows how well a school can act, rather than how good a school actually is. Which is fitting considering my school specialised in the arts.

Also, my primary school education wasn't great either. It was actually worse than my time at Secondary, because at Primary there was a lot of negligence by the teachers, and for a large part of the day we were left unattended. In year 6, we were often expected to take care of the younger years, whilst the teachers left the school (looking back...it was probably to go the pub or something) and not the entirety of year 6 either, five or so students were chosen each time during break and lunch to look after the younger years.

Three of us usually watched the receptions, and the other two looked after the year 1's. The strange thing is, at the time it never seemed unusual to me, because that's just what we were used to. It wasn't uncommon for there to be certain times where there were absolutely no teachers in the school premises. Year 6 had to act like teachers sometimes in an attempt to bring back some order.

I remember my dad bringing me back from the dentist, and him being appalled to find that there was only one member of staff in the entire school (we checked the staff-room, classrooms, playground...nothing) and they were a dinner lady. My dad asked her where they all were, and in a calm uncaring tone she just shrugged, then continued cleaning the floor.

During my time there, I was sent to the school's therapist. She ended up having a mental breakdown in front of me, and I didn't know what to do. They told me that I needed therapy because I "thought outside the box too much" and that "it will teach you to make more logical connections".

It turned out that the connections I made did make sense, but they were not inherently obvious to others.

Sometimes, I would forget to stop and explain my thought process, since what I saw as obvious was sometimes difficult for others to follow, so they just presumed I was crazy. When I took the time to explain the connections I would make to others, (which was always a pain because connections that felt almost automatic in my brain had to be explained to others in a lot of detail in order for them to understand what I meant) they would understand and often agree with me.

That is, everyone except my therapist. She would get mad when I gave answers she didn't like, and one day she started yelling because I said a different answer to the one that was on her sheet. That was the day where they had a mental breakdown in front of me. I don't think it was just me that led them to have a breakdown, and it certainly wasn't my intention to annoy her in any way.

To this day I wonder what exactly caused her to breakdown like that. Surely, it wasn't just the answer, right?

My primary school was a montessori school in a city in Australia. It was run by a stone cold sociopath. Years of being physically restrained and emotionally abused. Other children were pretty much allowed to do whatever they wanted to me. I got in trouble if I ever tried to run away or defend myself. She would accuse me of doing things I hadn't done and punish me. She would provoke me into having meltdowns so that she could send me home. She would stand over me and SCREAM at me to stop shouting when I was whispering; I eventually became scared of talking when she was around.
She convinced my parents that nowhere else would have me and had them grovelling to her and begging her not to kick me out.
I spend most of the last two years I was there hiding under a bench in the library reading novels I'd read a hundred times because it was the only place I could find that was almost safe. I once tried to jump out of the window in her office (3rd floor) to get away from her because she'd locked the door.
An inviting and nurturing educational environment. Apparently.

I didn't go to the high school, but everyone I talked to who did says it was pretty bad. The principal bullied a girl so bad she killed herself and he also shoved my brother into the wall.

I only went to the grade school from kindergarten to third grade. Kindergarten and first grade were okay, but second grade is when things started to go downhill. I was put in special ed in the fourth grade but it was basically a glorified babysitting service. I technically was in the fourth grade, but I was given kindergarten and first-grade level work to do instead of I don't know, actually teaching me. My mom wanted me to have an aide, but the school claimed they couldn't afford one. But then they were able to rebuild the football field and the f*****g school itself but somehow an aide was too expensive. My mom pulled me out the next year and homeschooled me ever since.

No, it was pretty average. Not the best school in the city, but not the worst either.

I only attended a bad school for a year which was at the beginning of middle school. My mom and I hated it. Not because of bullying or such cases but bullying was happening to others. The students were loud, fights have happened, and the worst of all, no one even knew that I was autistic, not even the special ed staff for the first 2 weeks of school even knew that I had autism.

After that year, I moved away from that school to another one near where I live now. I did make a couple friends but it didn't last.

Oh, my Secondary school was.

The school's attitude was to focus on the 'gifted few', and disregard the rest as unimportant. It was a dog eat dog environment and those who were seen as easy targets had no one to talk to without it backfiring on them. The worst thing for me was the PE teachers 'solution' to the 'problem' of me suffering a couple of Epileptic seizures during his lessons, which was to put me in 'forgot your PE kit' detention room during every PE lesson until I had finished the school entirely, instead of first talking to either my parents or my doctor about what to do (he had to when I told my parents about it, but nothing was changed).

I didn't know about my Aspergers at the time until around Year 10, which was only discovered by a psychologist who my parents arranged me to see due to bullying I was going through. It's left its mark and my parents still regret ever sending me there.