lore dump: my high school's batshit graduation rules

The following exchange popped up in the teacher group chat just now: First Year Teacher: I have several seniors absent. Do I mark them as present? I know today is Senior Skip Day. Principal: You mark them absent. Senior Skip Day is not on the calendar. An unexcused absence? That's it? I went through high school in the mid-late 1990s. It was the era of "Zero Tolerance" - the bonkers theory that if you punish the crap out of the tiniest infractions, nobody will commit larger ones. In middle school, this meant we got group punishments if any students were caught fighting. If two students in the same grade fought, the entire grade was punished. If students from different grades fought each other, their respective grades were punished. if they were fighting at lunchtime, the entire lunch group was punished. I remember once sitting in "punishment" next to a student *who had actively intervened to stop a fight* before the participants could actually lay hands on each other. Didn't matter. He…