Boarding-school life / A senior prank, May 2023
The Head of School Came Down for Tea. The Seniors Were Already There.
In May 2023 the senior class at St. Andrew's School in Delaware snuck into the head of school's house at 1 a.m. and went to sleep. She found them at 6, in her bathrobe.
Joy McGrath, head of St. Andrew's School in Middletown, Delaware, described it on the school blog in May 2023. She came downstairs at 6 a.m. for her morning tea and discovered that the class of 2023 had snuck into her house at 1 a.m. and bedded down for a sleepover-slash-senior-prank.
Speaking to CBS Philadelphia, she listed where. "Seventy-seven (students) in the living room, the library, the dining room, the back porch, the kitchen – they were everywhere." They had brought pillows, couch cushions and blankets.
She came downstairs for tea in a bathrobe and Crocs, and found the senior class asleep on her furniture.
A student filmed her opening the kitchen door. The video went viral. When she wrote about it, it had 3.5 million views. Her communications director emailed to say, roughly, that she probably wasn't thrilled about a video of herself in a bathrobe and Crocs, but that her response made the place look like a dream.
Her first reaction was shock, she wrote. Then, after a beat, she recognized the student filming, and thought: of course he's here, he's here a lot. He and his friends had just spent an entire Saturday in that kitchen, wearing her collection of floral aprons, cooking prom dinner for 22 students.
The aprons are the detail that tells you everything. Students who borrow your aprons to cook for twenty-two have stopped being guests.
She learned afterward that the seniors had help getting in: her husband, and other faculty.
Her husband. Every prank has an inside man.
St. Andrew's is entirely residential. Every student boards, and the faculty live on campus, so it is not unusual, McGrath noted, for students to be all over the first floor of her house. The school describes a community intentionally sized for real connection, with a phone-free culture. Which makes it funny, she wrote, that anything they did could go viral.
On my birthday this year, I came downstairs at six for coffee and found all three children asleep on the living room floor in sleeping bags, with the dog. They had wanted to surprise me with breakfast and had fallen asleep waiting. I stood there in my bathrobe for a long time.
My wife was the inside man. She has admitted it. She also took a picture. It has not gone viral, but it is on the fridge.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Going Viral, St. Andrew’s Head’s Blog standrews-de.org
- St. Andrew’s senior prank, CBS Philadelphia cbsnews.com
- Life at St. Andrew’s, official school homepage standrews-de.org