Graduated HS in 2000, 39 yo...  I dont recognize now vs. before and its the first time i've felt that way, strangely disconnected.  I assume it just gets worse from here on.  I don't know what my friends with teenagers are talking about half the time.

As far as high school, effing awesome time.  Also drove around while drinking and nobody died.  But when enforcement got serious in college that stopped with the quickness.   In high school (I was old for my grade) I had decent money from two part time gigs and bought a bunch of milsurps.  Kept em in my car in school parking lot with zero worries so I could hit the range after practice or work or whatever.  Did a school project for WWII with an enfield of my dads.  History teacher gave me an A.  State college was affordable as long as you worked all year, didnt have to take out a mortgage before even getting started like the zoomers.  College Rent for 3 bedroom apartment divided by 3 was about $75 dollars a month plus utils.

NE Indiana, can't say it was bad!   Hearing about you 80s kids though makes me jealous, I think that was the best time to be a kid in human history.

Class of 69. It was great. There was a comraderie among most of the students in my high school. We weren't allowed to leave the school during school hours but some of us would pile into one of our cars and drive to the little store in the nearest small town a couple miles away from the school. We'd get twinkies or other junk food and cokes that came in glass bottles. After we'd finished our cokes we'd lean out the car window and throw them at road signs as we drove back. Good times.

I graduated Washington HS (L.A.U.S.D.) in 1967. My HS was a dismal combination of the bright kids (half of the smart ones from Henry Clay Junior High... the other half went elsewhere by choice) and those students that had a hard time reading a ruler correctly (I kid you not) from the 5 other area junior highs. I was working part time at MacDonalds, a job I had until 1968, when I went to work for a large ticket agency in Hollywood. High School was a clique-filled wasteland that I was happy to get out of just a little more knowledgeable than when I was in Junior High. I nearly flunked out of college by the time I was a sophomore (luckily, I matured a bit and turned things).

I matured to normal human form when my daughter was born in 1985.

BTW: I never attended a reunion and I feel the quality of the student body was declining even when I left.

I went to engineering magnet school in 9th and 10th grade. Lot of drugs there. Regular high school in 11 and 12th. I got ahead in credits and got out of noon. 4 hours of class, 2 of auto mechanics, and 2 of welding, and then one english class. I dropped out due to that hard schedule lol. Just boredom. It never had the least impact on me.
Went to private school in middle school. I counted up once a few years after I got done with school. From 6th grade till 2 years after my senior year I knew 17 people that died in a DWI wreck, some of them 4 at a time. 18 was still drinking age and 15 the driving age.

Graduated mid 80s Va Bch. School was built in the early 60's. Another galaxy...

It could be a movie. It was real different, different times, different fucking everything. It was like an 80's "Dazed and Confused" set in a tourist beach town.

I did six months in a small town school in 10th grade in 87’

Rednecks, jacked up trucks, farmer’s daughters!

It was like a school full of kid rock’s and Jaimie Presley’s. Maybe the best 6 months of my youth.

I was just North of you in Frederick County MD... You are spot on.
Other than the Tobacco...

Same except this. "83"

Class of 87. There were no fatties and lots of bush.

Graduated in the mid 80's. We had shop classes, photography, a rifle team. No smoking lounge, but the seniors hung out near the rear doors, and many smoked.

Socially, the jocks weren't the top of the pyramid. Many of them were douchebags that a lot of people didn't like.
The clique I belong to was the closest thing we had to "popular kids," and we were an eclectic bunch - smart kids, dumb kids, non-douchey jocks, drama club kids, alternative kids, musicians, etc.

We were in the burbs, so the student body was overwhelmingly white. If I had to venture a guess, the black population of the school was less than 10%.
We didn't really have any racial problems. Then again, we didn't really have any ghetto blacks or white trash. Most folks got along.
The one black member of our group of friends was a nerd - he liked D&D, Rush, and Monty Python.

An earlier poster mentioned drunk driving. In my HS years, it was WAY more common. You were in the burbs. You went everywhere by car. It happened all the time.
As far as drugs (other than booze, which mainly meant beer) were concerned, pot was about as racy as it got. We had a burnout crew that did stronger stuff, but even they were kind of tame.

Our school was right behind a shopping center on the town's main drag, so seniors could go out for lunch.

I don't remember any outright bad teachers, and we actually had some really good ones.
Had one teacher who would hold court in his room after school. A bunch of us used to hang out there most days for an hour or two.
Heck, the guy even fixed kids up. LOL. "Hey, you know who'd be good for you?"
Next thing you know, someone was getting called down to his classroom on some pretext or another.
Try getting away with that today.

We didn't have any openly gay students, but we did have a few that people thought were gay. (And they were right. In college, at least two of my friends came out.)

HS was a pretty normal, 80's, suburban, experience.

Well, south of him, Southern, MD, Tobacco was King.

Smoking lounges.

Couple good points.

Lost a lot of kids due to drunk driving.
Some even to drunk boating.
And drunk dirt biking
And...
Drinking was everywhere, all the time.

One school of thought was if you LEARNED to drive after a few beers, you'd be a better drunk driver.

Other was, if you were drunk, you'd be more relaxed, and fare better in a crash.

As far as gheys, funny story.

One of my sister's ran into a classmate of mine from HS. Haven't seen of heard of the guy in 40 years. She said him and his HUSBAND were at a party she was at.

He said, " Tell your brother I'm gay, he' ll be shocked!"

I said, " Everyone called him Gay Bill for 4 years of HS. He must've been the only one who didn't know he was gay!"

Class of '87 here. It's all been posted already, so let me just say, "Ditto."

Inner city school with rampant crime and drug use and throw in a little racial fighting and you got where I went to school. There were places you stayed away from in school , like the side stairwell on the third floor , unless you wanted to get robbed. It was nothing to have a fight break out and once coming back from shop class we found clumps of hair and blood from a girl fight in front of our lockers. Oh , ya one dude took a blast from a .410 to the chest right after football practise.


Sounds awesome doesnt it!

I graduated in 1992 in a small Texas town. That movie was exactly like my high school experience too. I was more like Ron Slater, the long haired kid that dropped acid.

I actually work as a teacher at my high school.

Everything is much the same, except redneck culture really took over in a way I didn't expect. When I was in school here, jocks and preps were king. Now, it's farmers/welders/carpenters/anyone who wears camo.

I kinda like it better now.

1984 Grad class 8 people.  Half my class has already passed away.  Was the most magnificent time of my life.  Zero drugs around.  Lots of bonfires, cruising, hunting, lifetime friendships.  School actually closed for the first week of elk season.   67 Camero I wish I still had.
Us old folks have seen the best of times.  Gave my kids as much of it as I could but I am sad for my Grand Children.

Noticed that too.

One of my kids commented on it.
She said, " Kind of funny that all the kids that live in subdivisions drive lifted trucks, wear camo, and act " country".

She was mortified she grew up on a farm, and tried hard to conceal it.

Nothing like those 80's girls.
No second guess who's what.
Fags stayed in the closet or got bashed.

Good times.

I can remember us having one of those MADD "I Killed MY Best Friend" presentations. 'High School Me' felt sorry for the kid.
Back then, you just knew that the week before the crash, this kid was the passenger while his dead friend was the one driving drunk.
I've often noted that the attitude towards DWI is one thing that has changed A LOT in my lifetime.
Life today is definitely safer, as far as drunk driving is concerned.
Of course, these days, kids seem to have forgotten how to go out and be social around other people.
Today they just tap on their phones. We may have had a higher body count, but we also had more fun. (And probably more sex, too.)

Albemarle High School in Charlottesville, Va
Class of 1988
We had a designated smoking area outside. I never saw any real drugs at school although I do know the was some pot floating around on occasion. No real fights to speak of. No drug busts. No dogs. No metal detectors. Hot rods and muscle cars in the parking lot. Gun racks in the trucks. The doors weren’t locked and we would leave whenever we wanted to skip class or whatever. Seniors were allowed to leave for lunch. Lots of work release students and we had a tech school too for juniors and seniors, that took up half of the day so we were always coming and going from school. No bullshit of having to check in and out of the office. No photo IDs. The worst part is that the white girls still had flat asses.
ETA: we would go to DC on field trips. Supposed to be at the Smithsonian but they would park the busses and let us free, tell us to be back at the busses at whatever time. So we were free to roam the city. We’d walk all over the place, lucky we didn’t end up dead somewhere.

Exactly

South Dakota '86

2001 here also. 20yrs?!

lol, we might be classmates......  LBSS Class of 80 checking in.....

I'll add that the Fairfax County Cops were assholes at the time, freaking Gestapo

My four years in high school in the mid-late 90’s saw the transition from guys bringing and leaving their shotguns in their trucks so they could hunt after school to guns are icky, bad, and banned from school grounds, mmmkay.

ETA I might be wrong about the timeline, but I remember the farm boys pissed they had to go back home to get their shotgun and lose hunting time.

1984 in the Bay Area, CA.  HS offered a class on firearms safety as an elective if you didn’t want to take PE.  Speaking of PE, one of PE coaches impregnated his 16 year old student and he was pressured by district to marry her or resign.  He did, and kept his job.  

Reagan was prez, economy was booming, DoD was rolling out new weapons every month, 600 ship Navy was the goal.  Most importantly and because of the Cold War, security apparatus of the gov’t was facing outboard looking at external threats, not inward at law abiding US citizens.  

Southern dimocRats were more conservative, as was CA.

Monday thru Thursday, wake-up to Cheech and Chong on the clock radio, get dressed (boots, jeans, jacket) get to school, ponder where to eat lunch.

Friday's, same except drink a beer or two a lunch. Football. After game, cruise local drag, drink beer, raise hell. (Legal blood/alcohol limit: 1.2)  Six pack of Coors $1.29

Saturday, game film, hunting, shooting, fishing. Sat night, raise hell until midnight movie. Carry half pints in boots for movie.

Monthly keg parties. $1/person. Kept kegs in 18 yo truck. Busted by cops and chased out of park. Regroup an hour later across town.

Annual HS rivalry 'gang fight' at McDonalds. Lots of yelling and cursing. Out of 100 kids, maybe four guys would fight. Cops chase everyone away. ( If coaches found out you were there, you got 'special activities' Sat morning.

Sunday, Sunday school/church, big lunch, watch football and Wide World of Sports, try to find homework assignments


Social groups:

- Socials  regular kids, NHRA, backbone of society
- Nerds  
- Jocks
- Freaks  the dopers
- Goat Ropers  4H, Skoal, Willie, Waylon and the Boys, beater pickups, Levi jackets
- Preppies  Rich regular kids wearing preppy fashions (Valley girl types)

Senior Week:

- Tuesday parking lot drag races. Pits, Shop built lights and traps, bleached tires
- Wed  Senior Skip Day. Do anything except attend school.
-  Friday  School sponsored Senior Picnic at 'concrete lake' based amusement park. Smuggle in beer/whiskey. Teachers searched all bags and coolers.

Graduate. Enjoy summer. Head to college, trade school or start in family business.

Then get engaged. Marriage. House. Dogs. Kids. Parenting involving threatening kids with "severe physical/emotional trauma" if they dare behave like you did in your youth.

Good times. Can't believe I survived.

Class of 79 that sounds exactly like my school in plant city Florida. Heck I remember as a kid riding my bike through town carrying a .22 rifle to ace hardware to buy ammo. No one even gave me a second look.

Camped out alot with other HS friends. Never any violence per say. Never any shootings or stabbings. But the states ran their education system then too. Before the federal government stuck their fingers in the pot.

Suspended if your toast looks like a gun while eating it, water pistols, even drawing a picture of guns. Indoctrination of kids to being liberals. Drilling white privilege, lgbtq and many other things into kids heads. That has nothing to do with school. Conservatives are evil, Republican party evil. Teachers teaching their beliefs.

Get into trouble doing teen stuff. They'd take you home to your parents who actually disciple you. Not like today where they arrest kids for everything that we did as kids.

WTF happened to the world. It was actually a pretty peaceful and great time here.  

I graduated HS in 1985. I grew up in small town Florida. We had the usual cliques; Jocks, Popular Girls, Stoners, Band Geeks, Metalheads, Rednecks, Nerds, etc. but everybody was friendly to each other. You could be in multiple groups and have other friends in other groups as well. We had a mix of Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and First Americans. It may seem unbelievable today but we all got along. Sure there were individual fights, people got called names, etc. but you either worked it out or you avoided each other. Nobody killed each other and if you did something stupid, don’t expect other people to fight your battle.

I was part of the Band-Geek and Redneck groups but I also went to concerts in Orlando (a two hour drive) with a couple of the Metalheads I was friends with.

Pot was readily available but I did not partake myself. I would nurse a beer at swamp parties just to look cool. Other than that, no hard drug use that I knew of.

Cars were a big deal. It didn’t have to be fancy, just something that ran. If you didn’t have a car, you rode a bicycle everywhere. Fishing, hunting, canoeing and shooting were popular after school activities. We had a dirt road with sand piled up at the end that people used to shoot at. I’d go down there with my .22LR bolt-action and a box of 50 cartridges every couple weeks. Friday night football games were a social event for the entire town. A local fruit shipper would donate hundreds of broken pallets for the Homecoming bonfire. Local VFD held Turkey Shoots to raise money for equipment. The high school “Key Club” kids would run the targets and collect the entry fee. A Deputy Sheriff would score the cards and act as final judge.

We had cliques.  But that didn't mean that the school didn't have an unofficial policy that an act of aggression against one student was a declaration of war against the entire student body.  

Not many gun racks in the trucks.  We kept our stuff in the trunk or behind the seat.  And you could check you gun in to the chemistry lab in the morning if you were going to hunt on the way home after school.  

Lunch hour was a free for all.  I usually left the school and went to a local truck stop that had the best lunch ever.  

Girls?  They were great.

Class of 82.

Damn ...almost time for the 40 year reunion.

Small town in Texas.  Definitely a different experience than what my kids went through.  Such is life, times change.  

It would be fun to have more pictures.

Class of '89 here.

I went to small rural K-12 school well outside the city limits.  The nearest town was close by, but only 19,000 people lived there at that time.  I had 33 in my graduating class.

Being a rural school, it was sports, hunting and fishing.  I lifted weights, wrestled, and hunted and fished.  Guys would have rifles and shotguns in their trucks, and no one cared.  There was a rule against carrying knives, but it wasn't enforced and all the guys had a small lock blade folder in their pockets.  No one even thought about pulling a knife or a gun, fights were with fists.  And even then, fighting was relatively rare.

Alcohol was the drug of choice, and there were some very hard drinkers.  Regular keg parties out in the county.  One of my friends had to repeat 10th grade because of the time he missed while in rehab.  A couple of guys would smoke MJ, but if anyone did anything harder, they didn't talk about it.  In fact, most of the people I knew stayed away from MJ for fear of it being a gateway drug.  Some guys smoked, and would sneak in back of the gym to smoke a cigarette or cigar.  Most guys dipped or chewed at PE, and a few would dip in class, swallowing their spit!

Since the school didn't pay worth a squat, there was a high turnover in teachers.  The ones that stayed couldn't get a job anywhere else, and there were some real "winners" in there.  There were some good ones though, especially folks that had already retired from another career and wanted some additional money.  One of the best was a retired USAF Lt Col.  He finally figured out how to motivate me into doing my best, and I owe that man a debt that I will never able to repay.  The principal was a real "Richard Cranium" though.  I swear he was bipolar.  He could be a friendly easy going sort, and then a vicious nightmare.  If someone hadn't gotten into trouble in a while, you had to watch your step because it was like he was looking for someone to step out of line to get his rocks off.  He got me a couple of times over stupid stuff that most people would have just laughed at you and walked away.  I found out later that the teachers didn't care for him either.

Some of the kids were city preppies and some were from the country.  They would mix ok, but I did notice that the kids from town would be the biggest jerks.  Most of the kids drove hand me down or used cars, mostly trucks, Monte Carlos, Buicks or Honda Civics.  Most of the parents were middle class.

Back then, there was nothing around the school, and only a few homes maybe a mile or two away.  Now, there are subdivisions surrounding the school.

It was a good time to be alive.  It was the 80s, and there was a lot of hope and excitement.  I wouldn't want to be in school these days, in this screwed up world.

'79.  North Texas.  Duck and cover drills, tornado drills, fire drills,  no active shooter drills.  No locked doors.   Made a real crossbow in shop class.  THAT ain't happening anymore. It's funny how they don't do duck and cover drills anymore when we have plenty of nukes aimed at us still.  Probably futile now as it was then.

1966 Pre Disney Central Florida.  Paradise.

I had a 69 Cutlass S with a 4 spd

West Springfield, a little less squirelly than Hayfield. Probably slightly better drugs.

I was at that concert! We got gallon jugs of generic Fruit Drink at 7-11, pulled the tops off without pulling the tab. Poured out a pint and poured in a pint of Everclear. Everclear was 200 proof pure alcohol back then. The security guards let us in no problem. I was driving a brown 69 Pontiac Custom S with a GTO 400 in in and a T-400. 15" Pontiac rally wheels.

Our lunches were 50c, and you could get what tasted exactly like a Wendy's Frosty for 25c in a 12 oz cup.

WSHS, right down the road.

My Junior year we were so crowded they had to add a third lunch and 4th period was actually split into 2 halves. A friend convinced me we could walk to Giant, get a 6 pack, drink it, and be back in time for the 2nd half. Walked into English, sat down with everybody staring at me. BRRRRIINNGGG! Bells rings class is over. I walked out and nothing was ever said.

Not in my case.

'79...
The girls were HWP a few heavy set girls, but they were almost always stacked.

The teachers would take you aside and threaten you, if there was something they didn't like.

The teachers also were past service men, and talked about guns.
One kid did a report on hobby gunsmithing, and brought a sawed off shotgun he made. We didn't know they were illegal.

And the kids dressed sharp. Disco dresses were popular and even a normal girl looked pretty.
The attractive girls were absolutely gorgeous.

Pot and smoking were everywhere. All groups did it together a party,
Every week, from Thursday to Saturday night.

We had a 2 hour auto shop class. Chevelles Challengers and El Caminos...
Along side Vegas, Pintos and Bugs.

And we could ride our snowmobiles to school, there was an area to park near the football field.

AOR rock, was the music of the day.

It was a nice time to be a young man.

Where I am now in SoCal the drinking thing is less, and the drinking and driving thing is less...because nobody drives anymore.
Without your own car--and a job--you're not easily going to get alcohol.

Our local HS student parking lot is tiny, and is never filled.  They've taken much of it to incorporate a "student drop-off/pick-up" parking pattern.  Looks like a grade school in the mornings and afternoons.

LOL!  I made a crossbow in Summer school when I was in between 6th and 7th grades.  You bought the kit from the school; if I remember it was either a crossbow, a chess set, or a spice rack.

Hey why is Hugh Downs here?

Went to Potomac Senior High in 82.  About the same experience, but did not have so much open smoking on campus.  Drugs were everywhere.  Not allot of violence when I was there, but the football games could get pretty dicey at times.  I loved that time in my life.

1980 grad, St Louis area.

A different world now in so many ways I don't know where to start  LOL

In elementary school once a week for a good part of the year we got shrimp creole. Bet you don't see that much anymore. At the magnet school I went to in 9th and 10th grade we didn't even have sports teams. In 11th and 12th we had jocks but they weren't king and we weren't that great. Few years after I left they got better with some players that made the NFL, players like Todd McClure and such. Most of clique that was king were the party goers. The kids of well off parents in a 100% white suburb. Drinking was huge and I already mentioned all the dwi deaths. In the mixed magnet school drugs of all types were very popular.