Too cool 4 school

Say you’re a bad girl.  You want to drink, you want to experiment.  It’s wild to be bold and do crazy stunts, all the better to make your peers in school think that you’re ‘epic.’  Of course, to win instant notoriety, you could even advertise all the naughty pranks you’ve been up to, and what better way to do it than to post telltale pics on Facebook.  Whoa.  Instant fame.  Glamour.  The height of coolness.

The thing is, you study in a Catholic high school where posting pictures of yourself clad only in a bikini is an explicit no-no.  The prohibition is even found in the School Manual or the Code of Conduct or whatever other compendium of rules the school has in its arsenal.  What’s a naughty girl to do?

Oh well.  The nuns don’t have access to your account.  They’re not your friends.  And you’re on your senior year.  It’s nearly time to graduate.  Your finger hovers over the ‘upload’ button.  A final thought flits through your consciousness: you’ve passed all your final exams. That does it. Upload, it is.

And things go spiraling out of control.  Some jealous classmate leaks the pics to the nuns, and you find yourself harangued by a disciplinary tribunal.  The school frowns on antics like these: carousing, kissing, drinking: good heavens!  The nuns are scandalized!  So, the better to teach you and all future Lolita wannabes with, you’re not going to be allowed to march during graduation.

Oh sure, you’re going to be allowed to graduate. Except not in public.  Heaven forbid that God-fearing citizens find out you are a product of this fine institution that has seen decades of fine upstanding girls of the highest moral fiber pass through its hallowed halls.  No marching for you together with your more chaste peers.  No public recognition that you are an alumna.  No honor is to be given to you or your family, who seems to have been very permissive in bringing you up.  Lax, even.

What’s that?  You have a restraining order? An order from the court?  A judge has actually allowed you to graduate?  Has commanded the school to allow you to march with your batch?  You can go up the stage, your name can be called out, your diploma can be placed in your hands by Mother Superior?

Dream on, sister.  As they say, God will find a way.  Did the court order say that the security guards should allow you to enter the school? Did the order say you should be given a pass to get inside the gates? Uh-uh!  No pass, no entry.  Never mind that the substance of the order would, at least to ordinary citizens like me, mean doing whatever else needs to be done to enable you to participate in the graduation.  You still don’t get to go up the stage, honey.

This was the bizarre beginning of the Saint Theresa’s College extraordinary face off with the judiciary, starting with its defiance of a judge.  A judge who eventually had to inhibit himself, candidly admitting that he was incensed with the school’s decision to disobey.  Aided and abetted by a lawyer who insists that a bond had to be posted for the order to be effective  In its next salvo, the school now claims the judge didn’t even had jurisdiction to issue his order, so they could very well ignore him.

So come to think of it, if the school itself can’t abide by a court order, why expect its students to abide by its rules?