Shocking video leaks from wild end-of-year ‘rave’ that shut down $35k-a-year Loreto Kirribilli school and put staff at risk – as we reveal cruel Snapchats taunting teachers who tried to stop it
By Candace Sutton,Editor
Copyright dailymail
Barricades in the bathroom. Damage to school property. Teenage girls laughing like hyenas as they livestream their despairing teachers pleading for calm.
This is how students gleefully describe the ‘spontaneous rave’ that brought an elite Catholic girls’ school on Sydney’s lower north shore to its knees on Tuesday.
During the raucous dance party at the normally strict Loreto Kirribilli private college, toilets were broken, a locker was used to block access to the bathroom, and senior staff were filmed and ridiculed as they tried in vain to restore order.
Principal Nicole Archard sent 130 girls home and then cancelled classes completely after declaring the Year 12 girls’ untamed end-of-year rave was ‘unsafe and disrespectful’ and had put hundreds of other pupils and teachers ‘at risk’.
Some of the videos and photos of the rave being circulated by students – and seen by Daily Mail – are crudely AI-generated to make it appear as though the teachers who tried to stop the rave were in fact involved in it.
One such example is a fake image of Principal Archard wearing a black bra outside her shirt above a wild throng of excited students. An even more absurd fabrication shows Deputy Principal Romalina Rocca crowd surfing with a boom box above her head.
While those AI mock-ups may raise a laugh, the real footage of the party is chaotic.
One unaltered video of the crazy scenes at Loreto during morning recess shows teachers panicking as a mob of girls, all in their blue school uniforms, shout and stomp in the common room with their arms thrust into the air.
An ex-student told Daily Mail that while the ‘rave’ has been a tradition at Loreto for more than a decade when girls graduate, the school tolerates, rather than authorises the event.
Determined to break a previous rave record of 22 minutes, the Year 12 girls had secretly planned to go longer – but when teachers shut it down at the 13-minute mark, they retreated to the toilets to continue the chaos.
In the video, as the students move on into the girls’ toilets, Deputy Principal Rocca can be seen pointing anxiously and a male teacher pokes his head above a partition from the disabled toilet and urges them to stop.
Another image shows clearly identifiable girls in their uniforms pushing a black locker as a barricade against the toilet doors as other teachers frantically try to shut the rave down.
Loreto is a traditional girls’ college, with stringent codes for students to have uniforms below knee length, their hair tied back, and wear no make-up, earrings or jewellery. Year 12 fees are $35,000.
On Tuesday, Principal Archard suspended Year 12 – aside from, a former student told Daily Mail, ‘a few nerds who didn’t participate in the rave’ – and halted on-campus classes on Wednesday.
Despite the chaos of the week, Loreto’s ‘Staff Appreciation Day’ went ahead as planned on Thursday. The school and Principal Archard were contacted for comment.
In a letter to parents, Ms Archard wrote that the ‘behaviour that was unsafe and disrespectful’, displayed collectively by the 130 girls, ‘placed students and staff at risk, caused damage to property and disrupted the learning environment’.
‘Such behaviour is taken very seriously, as it undermines the respectful, safe and caring culture we strive to maintain at Loreto Kirribilli,’ Ms Archard added.
‘We ask that you take the opportunity to discuss this incident with your daughter and reinforce the importance of personal responsibility, respect for self and others, and care for our school environment.’
Former students told Daily Mail that Tuesday’s rave was intended to break the previous 22-minute record in a tradition that dates back to 2013.
For years, Loreto has tried to tame end-of-year celebrations. After the usual ‘muck-up day’ was banned on the last day of school, the girls instead organised a ‘scavenger hunt’ while not in their school uniforms.
Known as the ‘scav hunt’, girls split into teams and would run around Sydney completing bizarre tasks, such as chugging two litres of milk, kissing a businessman over the age of 50 on the lips, or getting a tattoo.
But from 2013 onwards, the preferred way for girls to let their hair down was holding a ‘blackout disco’ – known as ‘The Rave’ – in and outside the Year 12 common room, which is where this year’s ruckus began.
The ‘naughty’ students are still expected to graduate on Friday, meaning they will escape further punishment.