St. Andrew’s School class of 2023 has taken the senior prank tradition to viral proportions.
In the days leading up to graduation, 70 students piled into the first floor of the on-campus house of Joy McGrath, Head of School at St. Andrew’s, in the middle of the night leaving McGrath with a surprising wake up call.
The video taken by Austin Chuang, a senior from the Middletown area boarding school, has reached over 22 million views on Saint Andrew’s Instagram page, and has been reposted by other popular social media pages like Overtime where the video accumulated another 31 million views and five million likes on Tiktok.
At St. Andrew’s all of the faculty live on campus in close proximity to the students, so the virality of the video and the prank concept was a complete shock to them.
“We’re a boarding school, we’re parenting kids since their parents aren’t here,” McGrath said. “There’s students at my house all the time, it’s not that unusual.”
According to Chuang and his classmates Ford Chapman and Trinity Smith, co-presidents of their class, the idea arose after the school’s prom night when McGrath and her husband hosted the students for a post-prom meal in their home.
“A few students tried to fall asleep on the couch, and then someone had the idea,” Chapman said. “We approached [McGrath’s husband] about it, and he loved the idea.”
From there, McGrath’s husband worked behind her back with the dean of students to organize a time for the students to sneak in unsuspectingly, which ended up being around 1 a.m. The dean then organized a gourmet coffee bar and donuts in McGrath’s kitchen for the students to reap the benefits of their work.
The irony of the video being so well received is that cell phones and social media are effectively banned on St. Andrew’s campus. But to the staff and students, the video proves the close-knit community that the school has built.
“I think one reason why the video took off is because a lot of people can’t logistically fathom how a class could come together in this way and commit to doing this,” Smith said. “But I think it just speaks to how our class really thrives on that togetherness.”
This is only McGrath’s second year as head of school, which means the bar for senior pranks has been set extraordinarily high for the next classes.
“Most boarding schools have a tradition of great pranks,” McGrath said. “But I think it will be a hard one to surpass.”
Contact Molly McVety at mmcvety@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @mollymcvety.
