People Share The Dumbest Rules Their School Enforced

In grade school, we weren't allowed to play on the playground equipment when it snowed. Eventually, we weren't allowed to play with snow or even go near it- I got in trouble for sitting in snow.

This was in Minnesota where it snows half the year. Recess basically consisted of milling around the blacktop for thirty minutes.

Locked the only boys bathroom because someone wrote on the wall in sharpie. It wasn't even anything rude or inappropriate either. It was just the word "hi" or something like that.

Didn't unlock the door until one boy wet himself and parents threatened to sue.

They outlawed bracelets because there was an article in a magazine somewhere saying they advertised what sexual acts you were open for based on their color. Then someone tried to outlaw wristwatches for the same reason.

My school had 3 staircases along a very long corridor. we were banned from using the middle staircase because it got overcrowded. the ban was lifted once they realized it only made the other two staircases just as crowded.

I got a suspension for holding a stick. The phone call with my mom went something like this (only slightly dramatized):

School: Mrs. TheQueq, your son has been suspended.

Mom: Oh my goodness, what did he do?

S: He was holding a stick.

M: Did he hit someone with it?

S: No. He was just holding it.

M: ...Did he threaten to hit someone with it?

S: No, just held it.

M: Did he refuse to put it down when you asked?

S: No, no, he was very cooperative.

M: So... what did he do wrong?

S: He held a stick.

M: And I should be upset about that?

S: Absolutely, you know we have a zero-tolerance policy.

M: Right... well, I'll talk with him.

As you might guess, I did not get in trouble at home.

We suddenly one day weren’t allowed to stand in circles during recess because, and I quote “we could be dealing drugs.” I will add that for the years prior we had been standing in circles no problem.

Next recess, we stood in a triangle, cue principle going apest. Next day we stood in a square, principal kept us inside for a week. And threatened us all with detentions if we did it again etc.

I believe their idea was open-ended circles so they could see what we were doing. Still stupid.

When I was in Junior school (UK boarding school in the ‘80s), we were not allowed to say OK as it was considered slang and not befitting the young ladies and gentlemen that we should aspire to be. For context, Junior school covered ages 5-13.

We also had to have a comb and a handkerchief on us at all times. On top of that, we weren’t allowed to have our hands in our pockets because, ‘it looks slovenly’.

It wasn't really the rule that was dumb but the reason for it. In my last year of high school, the school issued a rule that all students had to wear student IDs. If you didn't, you had to immediately go and pay for another ID. While you can see how many students may have seen this as a way to skip class, the reason for this was the school shootings that happened the previous year.

The reasoning was that it would be easier to spot who is a student and who is not a student to then see who has malicious intent.....except that most shooters were students....so....

This was in 1997/98, by the way. Apparently, the high school girls’ room was going through too much toilet paper so the dean, a woman, stood outside the door and distributed a few squares of 1-ply institutional toilet paper to us as we went in. If she noticed toilet paper on the floor, our ration got cut down. If we asked for more for...bigger jobs...we were told to save it for home.

There were several episodes of girls stuck in the stalls until friends could beg for more TP because of period messes or unexpected bowel incidents. The dean wouldn't even hand it over - she would go in the bathroom and pass it a few squares at a time over the door. If you didn't catch it as it fell and it landed on the floor, well, that's your fault and you're not getting more. If you used more than she thought necessary, tough luck, go to class with blood/st on your body.

It took about a week of extremely angry parents coming to the school and calling both the school and the school board, but we finally got our toilet paperback, unlimited.

How did we celebrate? By TPing her car, of course.

I was wearing a regulation uniform jacket in a classroom during winter that had no heating. The teacher demanded I remove my jacket and I refused because I was cold. She sent me to the headmistress.

Rule: No duct tape ON clothing

Reason: Some girls thought they could get past the "no ripped jeans" rule by covering the tears with duct tape. It became a "fad" and everyone started doing it so it got banned. A kid in my AP literature class found a loophole and MADE an entire outfit out of red and black duct tape. I mean Shorts, A TShirt AND a jacket and SHOES. When the school tried to suspend him they couldn't because the rule Was " No Duct Tape ON clothes." It said nothing about clothes made OUT OF duct tape. He won the argument and even wore the outfit a few more times as a way to thumb his nose at the school and principals.

The boys and girls had to use different staircases. To clarify, this rule was enforced purely with the idea that good boys and girls don’t talk to each other. The general air in the school was “don’t have anything to do with the opposite gender”. I was in this school for only 2 years and coming from another good coed school, this really weirded me out. Also, the guys would just act creepy even for a simple “can you please move out of the way?” I believe this awkwardness could be prevented if there wasn’t such an obvious separation between the genders.

It wasn’t even a religious school. Just a general public school.

This meant both the kid who started the fight AND the kid who got beat on were both suspended. If the kid who got beat on just took it, he was just sent home for the rest of the day. If he dared to fight back, he was suspended for a week just like the kid who started the fight. Here's the truly stupid part: The school administrators couldn't explain how this led to MORE BRUTAL fights.

Rule: No leaving the dorm unless it's for a fire alarm.

I went to boarding school at the age of 7. That rule meant we couldn't get out of our dormitory to have a wee in the night. We had a plastic tub one of the girls brought in and went in that. Then we had to smuggle the tub to the bathroom in the morning without the matron seeing. Stupid bloody rule!

If you were caught on your phone they’d take it until the end of the week. you’d get it back at half 3 on Friday. parents went mental and a few even came together and sent bills through for part of the phone bills, they ditched that rule after 2 weeks.

The phones were kept overnight in the school in the office until that Friday if they were confiscated. no safe or anything, just in a plastic box. no getting it back at the end of the day, you just had to go for days without a phone, even at home. just in case there’s any confusion around that.

Went to school during the time where health and safety suddenly started going crazy, they introduced a "no contact under any circumstances" rule i.e no touching another person, we were like 6 or 7 years old. Suddenly one day not only is tag suddenly illegal, but they actually enforced it, I remember one day like 70% of the school’s population was pulled off of the playground and made to sit on the floor in the hall, for the crime of just playing the games that children play.

The new principal made a "morning round-up" rule where anyone arriving to class after the last bell had to go to the cafeteria and listen to a lecture about not being late for class. This took about an extra 15 minutes, making the students even later to class than they would have otherwise been. Needless to say, everyone hated it, even the teachers. That principal didn't last long.

Elementary school principal banned talking at lunch. If you were caught talking or even signing to someone, you had to go sit by yourself on a folding chair with no table.

There was once my mom came to eat lunch with my older sister and I. The principal was like " Oh you should go eat out in the hallway with your daughters" and she was like "nah, I'm gonna sit here with my daughter and her friends and talk to them and enjoy their presence" (usually if a parent came for lunch the student could invite one friend to join, unless you had siblings. Then it was too many people so you couldn't invite a friend). Anyway, one of my older sister's friends whispered to my mom that she was going to move so she wouldn't get in trouble for talking. THIS WAS A NINE YEAR OLD.

I was sent to the principal in elementary school for getting a drink of water out of line (as in we walked down the hall in a formation and we had designated water drinking stops). To this day I still remember the principal asking angrily well what if everyone started getting water without permission? And I still don’t have an answer.

Textbook checkouts were an absolute st show. They were assigned entirely by number and condition. They were not assigned to a specific student. As long as you turned in a textbook at the end of the year and the textbook number was on the list, that was the first step to being ok. The second step was condition.

The textbooks were graded as new, good, fair, and poor. If the book was returned in a lesser condition than when it was checked out, you had to pay for a new textbook. This included condition changes from new to good, yet we almost never got new textbooks. The ones we had were usually around 10 years old, so they went through at least 3 condition changes over their lifespan. It was pure extortion. You had to pay for the textbook at the end of the year and if you didn't, they'd keep you from advancing.

So that sucks, right? That compounded with another stupid rule we had. Lockers were not allowed to be locked. In fact, our lockers didn't even have a latch; they were just painted wooden "doors" that were really just poorly installed flaps that would hang open. This was ultimately so the cops could check everyone's lockers for drugs, but it led to another issue...stolen textbooks.

So the textbooks were generally falling apart and we were expected to both keep them with us for class and also bring them home with us for homework. We also didn't want them stolen so most students kept them in their backpacks constantly. For every class. This was a rural school, too, so most students had a decent walk home even from bus stops (mine was about a mile). The point being the textbooks were abused, as were our backs and backpacks.

So you start with a poor condition textbook and add the extra wear and tear and it's just a matter of time before the cover rips off. So those with st textbooks would just grab one from whatever exposed locker had one. As long as the student was in the same class as you, it's fair game.

In case you were wondering where the money went, it went into new awnings every year for the exterior doorways and into our famously bad football team. Our girls’ teams were a bunch of champions and never got any respect for it... The school only cared about our shty football team. They would go entire seasons without a single win.

No Ripped Jeans

They enforced it to the point that when I fell in school, scraped my knee, and ended up needing stitches (obviously ripping my jeans in the process). They still dragged me to the office to suspend me for the day because my jeans were ripped. I was left there, stitched up, blood drying on my jeans as the vice principal yelled at me that my outfit was “inappropriate”.

I went to a private school outside of the US, we had a doctor on call so he stitched me up at school, notified my parents, and gave the okay on me to go back to class. The VP didn’t notify my parents I was getting suspended for the day until after I went home and told them myself.

My school was in a poor area of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Not a lot of schools here have money for anything. Because of a huge donation of books at the time I was in school, my school got an absurd number of books, including expensive ones.

There were a few dumb rules, but the dumbest of them all?

We basically couldn't touch the books in the library without permission. It might sound reasonable at first, but check this out.

The library was huge, and there were lots of books, including contemporary classics, non-fiction like The Last Problem, English Literature like Infinite Jest, How to kill a Mockingbird and whatnot. Dude, there was so much there, that place was probably the most valuable place in the entire school.

I mean, it was awesome, there were enough books there for each student to lend about 100 every day.

Here's the problem, the library went all but untouched for the entirety of my time there. Why? The amount of work it took to read one of those books was ridiculous and pretty much made sure not a single student bothered to try.

First, you couldn't take any of the books home, period. Forget the fact that they had your address and all your parents’ info, so in the case that someone took it and didn't return it, they could just get it back - it had happened before at least once before the rule was made.

Second, you couldn't leave the library with them, no matter what.

Third, if you wanted to read the book, you'd have to do it in the library at the lunch break, which was about 45 minutes, so unless you weren't hungry ever, you had only a few minutes to go to the library. It was only open for a few hours around the break and not at all at any other time, so unless you stayed there for hours until the break for the afternoon classes, you just wouldn't have another chance. (Those hours around the break could be used for you to be tutored by a teacher, which almost never happened)

Fourth, once you went through all of that, you could only read the book under the observation of the people that volunteered to work in the library for credit, which was never more than two or three people, sometimes no one. Which means that if you got there and there were already three people there, forget it. Unless you were willing to read it standing up close to where the book was kept and even then they'd check on you every minute or so.

Fifth, you couldn't get inside the library with a backpack, with food, in groups, speaking, without the appropriate uniform - you couldn't get in with the gym one, for instance -, with other books, earrings, necklaces or anything that could make noise while you were walking. Some were reasonable, but the issue was that one simple mistake and you would get banned.

Sixth, any banishment from it was permanent. I complained about it once in the second year and was never allowed inside ever again. I even tried to get some teachers to help me, but it didn't work.

Seventh, and probably the dumbest, only the students that had a certain amount of high grades could get any book at all. If you got something like 4/10 on your last biology exam, you couldn't even get inside the library. The standard was so insane, only six other students and I in my classroom had enough good grades to get books.

In all my time there, the library was basically deserted for the majority of it. I tried to go there many times, but it was too much work. Out of all the books I only managed to read two Brazilian ones "A guerra do lanche" (The lunch war) and "Blecaute" (Blackout) which I remembered to this day in details. There were times where I legit thought about straight up ditching class to read some of them.

I tried to get more, like The Last Problem, Kafka's Metamorphosis, Ulisses - which I know I wouldn't have been able to do it, but I was just curious -, A brief story of time, Wuthering Heights, etc.

But the amount of work it took was so much that it was just almost impossible to be able to read more than one or two books a year, and even that took dedication because I basically had to sacrifice part of my lunchtime.

The rumor was that the principals* - we had more than one - basically saw us as "savages" who would destroy the books if we were allowed to touch them and even though they had no reason to believe so - the library worked well without those restrictions a year before I had gotten there, with only minimal incidents and even those didn't result in the books getting destroyed.

Conservative Christian College. A group of us played Age of Empires one weekend. They didn’t like it and called a meeting. Everyone involved got misdemeanors on their records. There was nothing in the handbook about it being against the rules. The only person that didn’t get any punishment was the son of the president even though he was just as involved as the rest of us. Was quite interesting explaining the write-up on my record when I transferred - “You got a misdemeanor for what?!”

A few weird ones and their reasoning behind making them:

Girls weren't allowed to wear tops with spaghetti straps because they could be easily cut with scissors.

No tube tops either, because they could easily be pulled down.

No bra straps showing whatsoever, because it was considered indecent

No soft drinks with actual sugar because if it spilled it would make a sticky mess. Diet soft drinks were fine because they wouldn't get as sticky

No beverages of any kind (only in certain classrooms, depending on who the teacher was. Not like, computer labs where it was obvious drinks shouldn't be allowed, I'm talking like...random math or history classes based on who your teacher was, whereas the same class taught by a different teacher, it was allowed), because fk you if you're thirsty.

No shirts from the company "Billabong" because it says "bong" and that's a drug reference

And last but not least, because this one is a really funny one and I'm hoping someone from my class sees this and can confirm:

No wearing the Alice in Wonderland joint smoking caterpillar shirts that we designed for homecoming week because that's absolutely not a paintbrush. This one makes sense...no idea how it got approved.

The best part was the assistant principal firing up the PA about 20 minutes into first period: "Attention students. Will the entire Sophomore class please report to the auditorium for a mandatory meeting. You know why. Thank you."

After 9/11, my school instituted a zero-tolerance policy on bullying and violence. What 9/11 had to do with bullying, I don't know. Anyways, Halloween 2001, I dressed up as the guy from Clockwork Orange. He carries a cane around. The principal pulled me aside, told me walking around with a cane could be a weapon, therefore just walking with it is an act of violence, and suspended me for a couple of days, telling me that after 9/11, "we don't mess around with that kind of stuff".

My high school had "coordinates", not a uniform. But they stopped selling the shorts like a decade before I started there... So me and a bunch of buddies tracked down used pairs and started wearing them.

Next year, shorts were banned outright... So me and a bunch of buddies on the rugby team started wearing skirts because the rules said skirts were acceptable but didn't specify gender. So you had a bunch of guys with hairy, hairy legs walking around in skirts we deliberately hiked up a little to show some thigh.

Shorts were allowed again in a week.

When I started 8th grade at a new school my hair was a horrible bleach job. A few months in I dyed it back to my natural color of red to match my grown out roots and promptly got a suspension for it being an “unnatural color.” My red headed mother showed up to the school and lived up to all those stereotypes about us having a temper.

The student handbook said hair could be dyed only natural colors. They tried to argue that red was not my natural color which it is and is not what their own rule said. Like, piss bleach gold is a natural color? This was when every boy in my school bleached the top of their heads and never toned it and they got to walk around with no hassle. My suspension was rescinded and they never said st to me about my hair ever again. You wanna fk around and find out? I’ll bring a banshee to school.

My school banned water bottles.

A water drinking fad started at my school, mostly among girls, and soon all of them were walking around carrying plastic purified water bottles from the major brands. They all wanted to look health-conscious and cool.

But then it became a matter of showing off who can be the most healthy and hydrated, so having a mere 750ml bottle wasn’t enough anymore. So the girls began bringing larger and larger water bottles and jugs to school to outshine one another. Eventually they began carrying 5L plastic jugs with them all over the school grounds. It looked silly.

Eventually the guys jumped onboard the fad and brought even larger water containers to school. One guy brought a baggage trolley to school on which he transported a 20L industrial water dispenser bottle.

At this point the principal had had enough. It was a posh, image-conscious school with fancy uniforms and he didn't like seeing the students all lugging around big plastic jugs of water, looking like homeless people. So he banned any and all water bottles from school and told the students to drink water from the bathroom taps and other drinking fountains.

This is dumb because drinking water regularly is healthy. He could have simply banned all bottles over 750ml and could have simply told us to keep the bottles hidden away in our bags and out of sight when walking around between classes.

I got Saturday school for missing a day of classes when I was 16. Seems reasonable, except I missed to go complete my US citizenship and officially become a citizen alongside my mom (it took us 12 years to go through the legal process, btw. Whole other issue). I had a note from my mother as well as a signed official Federal form they give you to explain to school/employers why you were absent. Apparently the only acceptable absence excuse was illness. I got punished for becoming a citizen.

Clear liquids only. Some kid brought in gatorade mixed with alcohol of some sort so in effort to combat it afterwards they wanted us to only drink clear liquids out of clear containers. As if vodka and white rum don't exist.