Last week’s senior prank, or the so-called “Senior Snuggle,” was meant to be a rousing victory for the Class of 2014. For those involved, it certainly could have went better. With a sizable number of students entirely skipping their fourth hour classes to lounge about the floor around the senior bench, those in attendance have drawn some heavy criticism for their actions. Participants were berated by various staff members as well as their peers. To offer some comparison, over the last few years Cannon Falls High School has seen smoke bombs in the hallways as well as some hodgepodge mess of a boat with a shoddily attached mast placed on our front lawn. This “Senior Snuggle” doesn’t come close to this appalling standard set no more than a few years ago, but one must wonder whether or not seniors should be required to match the rambunctious jokes of years past.

To understand why our school bore witness to such a debacle this past week, we need to look to the pranksters themselves. Long has the Class of 2014 been lauded as one of the most well-behaved to go through this school in recent memory. A few loose cannons, or bad apples, if you will, here and there, but a nice bunch overall. If our student body is to learn one thing from this cuddly fiasco, it’s that the seniors are making a misguided attempt to obtain some shred of class pride from the crazy things the culture of pranks inherited from years past said they were supposed to do.

However, the class seems to be going out with a whimper instead of a bang by CFHS  prankster standards. No smoke, no sails, no standing as one of “those” graduating classes. It begs the question of whether or not seniors need to continuously uphold the standards of class pranks that predate their own. By anyone’s standards, this year’s seniors have not reached the level of pranking that has come before them. But is that necessarily a bad thing? Senior pranks have been nothing but a headache and pain in the backside for staff and student body alike over the years. This year it was so tasteless that the only response you could get from faculty, staff, or administrator to the words “Senior Snuggle” were rolled eyes and an expression somewhere between nausea and disgust.

Guidance Office secretary Deb Klegin, and many of our more seasoned faculty members, remember a better time. A time when seniors made donations to the school like commencement banners and trees, leaving what was called a senior class “legacy” – where seniors were remembered for the good that they did, instead of whatever shenanigans they carried out over the course of their last year. Sadly, this custom died off, and with it graduating classes that staff, faculty and administration could look back upon with fondness. Perhaps now would be the time for the Class of 2014 to reinvigorate this long-lost tradition.

It’s time the seniors stop trying to prank the school, and instead set a good example for the underclassmen. Since the Class of 2014 has kept their collective noses clean all year save this one blemish, it would be a shame to toss out this perfectly good opportunity to be a positive force in the school and set a new precedence for future senior classes.