#ANYWAYS. 8th graders were getting tours of the place and when they came to my class i had to show them design and stuff so they could

[sharkdays]

just got finished touring 8th graders for 3 hours straight!

[captainolive23]

Fun Facts about Lawrence, Kansas

(So this is mostly just for people who want their fics to be accurate. I'm not saying you have to use these things in fics but if you want to, here ya go.) Ok so as someone from Lawrence I have trouble reading supernatural high school au fics that take place in Lawrence because of all the inaccuracies. Which is the sucky part of having the main characters from your favorite show be from your home town. Ok so first off if your fic takes place before 1997(1996?) then there was only one high school in town (Lawrence High) but if you're making it take place in modern day then there are 2. The newer one is the one I went to so I'm gonna give you some facts about Free State cuz I don't know shit about Lawrence High. -Free State was designed by a prison designer. -they were going to name it "Quantill High" but if you know anything about Lawrence history you know that Quantrill was a dude from Missouri, who during the civil war came over to Lawrence and burnt the town to the ground and killed a shit ton of people. -when you first walk into free state you see the main common area which is also the lunch room. There's two main doors leading into this area. One is on the side that faces the main road and the other is on the side that faces the student parking lot. The entrance to the office is on the side with the parking lot. -up until my senior year anyone could pretty much walk in the doors any time of day. Then in my junior year there was a remodel and the office got moved so they started locking the doors during the day and if a parent needed to come in or if a student got in late you had to get buzzed in through the office. -one security guard is total dick and will get after anyone for anything. Like wearing hats for example. While wearing a hat was against the dress code, none of the teachers gave a shit. The principal didn't give a shit either. Hell the other security guard really didn't give a shit. But one time it was snowing and it was cold as fuck and I was wearing my hat. The second I walked in the door this guy was yelling at me for wearing a hat. -so the average school day goes from either 0 hour to 6th hour or 1st hour to 7th hour. Most people go 1-7 but one of my friends went 0-6 since she had to be at school super early every day anyway. 0 hour starts at 7 am. 1st hour starts at 8. I wanna say that 6th hour ends at 2:20ish but I could be wrong. 7th hour ends at 3:10. -there are 3 lunch periods taking place throughout 5th hour. 1st lunch was preferred by most people but second lunch was nice to cuz it cut 5th hour in half and made it feel waaayy shorter. -we also had open lunch where we could leave to go to one of the restaurants or stores that surrounded the school. There was taco bell, burger king, McDonald's, starbucks, Jimmy johns, arbys, little ceasars (which tastes like the schools pizza so we avoided going there), dominoes, Chipotle and orange leaf(frozen yogurt place) and there was a Wal-Mart, CVS, a dillons (krogers grocery store), hyvee (another grocery store) and sprouts (organic food grocery store). If you had a car you could probably go other places too but lunch was only 30 minutes long so most people didn't. -wednesday and Thursday are short days. Until my senior year (so last year) Wednesday schedule was 0,1,3,5,7 starting at 7 and ending at 2:30. Thursday was 2,4,6 and was late arrival so school didn't start until 9 and went until 2. That switched my senior year so now Wednesday is the super short day. -they also started holding classes at the new career and college center during my senior year. Basically juniors and seniors can take one 3 hour long class at this place and get college credit. The class I took was forensic science but there was also a nursing class and a robotics class. There were others to but I don't remember them. You could either take the class in the morning or in the afternoon (which is what I did) and it only lasted one semester but if you took the science class that gave you a whole science credit instead of half a credit like a normal science class. -you only needed 3 science and 3 math credits to graduate but it you wanted to go to college you needed 4 of each. You had to have 4 English credits to graduate. -senior consumer math taught you how to do taxes and shit. -as long as you're not an overachiever senior English classes are fucking easy as hell. My first semester class was myth, fantasy, and folklore and we barely had to to any writing and my teacher read to us cuz it was the first class of the day and Mr. Wolak was about to have his first kid so he was practicing his character voices. And the second semester class was a little harder cuz it was mostly writing but Ms. Elliot was super laid back (someone brought pot brownies to her class once and she ate one even tho she knew there was pot in it. Seriously there's a reason she was everyone's favorite teacher) -the dress code was not heavily enforced. The only person who really cared was the security guard I was talking about earlier. -juniors and seniors could be office aids or teacher aids. Becoming a teacher aid was a little harder cuz you had to get a note from the teacher and permission from your counselor but becoming an office aid was pretty easy as long as there was an opening. -you only had to have half a P.E. credit (one semester) to graduate. Most people took more since it was an easy a. -you also had to have half a foreign language credit. So now we're going to get into actual stuff about Lawrence. -LAWRENCE IS NOT A SMALL TOWN. In the 80s and early 90s it kind of was but it's not anymore so if you're writing a fic that takes place in the 80s or 90s then it's fine to write it as a smallish town. But if you're basing it in modern day Lawrence it's not small. The high schools are getting so overcrowded they're thinking of building a third one. -there are 14 elementary schools. 4 middle schools(which were junior high (7-9th grade) until my 8th grade year when it switched to middle school(6-8th) in 2011). There are 2 high schools. There's also a bunch of private schools but idk how many since they're not on the district website. -downtown Lawrence has a bunch of really cool old houses and all 3rd graders in the town get to take a tour of downtown Lawrence and see all the historic spots (like the giant boulder in the park and the oldest cemetery in town) -the sorority and frat houses are in downtown Lawrence. -there's this really creepy mansion between the frat houses that I always thought looked like a castle and I'm pretty sure a dentist lives there or at least did when I was little. -the guy who invented basketball lived here. -a couple years ago they blew up one of the dorm buildings cuz they built a new one and it was this huge thing that anyone who didn't have to work that day went to watch. I still have the video on my laptop. It was awesome. -the one place almost every teenager in town goes to hang out is java break. Its been here since my mom was a kid. They make milkshakes and smoothies and you can add cereal to them. There's a room in the back that's basically the graffiti room. You can draw on any surface you can find in there. There's some really cool art work in there and every once in a while they go in and paint over it. Most people just draw dicks tho. -the last day that the outdoor pool is open every summer they have a dog day where people bring their dogs to go swimming. I've never been since my dog hates water and other dogs but it always looks like fun. -on the 4th of July they have a firework show by the river which is next to downtown. I usually go to the hospital parking lot to watch it. -there's this one homeless dude who lives near the river who has chickens and the cops just sort of leave him alone cuz he's far enough away from any residential areas that he's not bothering anyone. -Lawrence is the most liberal town in Kansas mostly because Its a college town. We are an island of blue in a sea of red. -there are still racist homophobic douchebags here but not nearly as many as you would expect. There are a couple assholes that like to hang confederate flags on their trucks. Unfortunately said douchebags went to my school. They didn't have many friends tho. -the the Campbell's own pretty much everything in town. Every time they start another housing community they named it after one of their kids. From what I've heard most of their kids are pretty nice but I knew one of them and he was a total dick. He was the stereotypical rich white guy. -the other super rich family in town is the Compton's. They own peacocks, zebras and a camel. -both families live in these super huge mansions near free state high school. The Compton's oldest son dropped out of college to become a rapper and from what I heard he sucks at it. -for a long ass time there was only one place in town you could get fried chicken (kfc) but in the past 2 years we've gotten about 10 different fried chicken places. All of them within about a 3 block radius of each other. -for a long time (about 20 years) there was a bridge to no where next to the movie theater because they started building a road but then had to stop cuz they didn't have permission to build through the marshlands. They recently finished it. -the movie theater got remodeled in the last couple of years and it used to be super gross but now it has reclining seats that are super comfortable and it's a lot cleaner than it used to be -south park is downtown and it has a gazebo. -every year the humane society hosts a zombie walk downtown and it starts at south park. Its a really big thing. People decorate their jeeps with zombie parts and fake blood and have "zombie hunter" stickers. People dress up as either zombies or zombie hunters and walk through downtown. Some of the zombie costumes are fucking amazing. And there's always this one guy that goes with his daughter and they run up to random people and scream in their faces. My best friend got her picture in the paper one year cuz her zombie costume was that good. Anyway that's all I can think of for now. If anyone wants a part 2 or has any questions just ask and I'll do my best to help.