High school students surprise principal with matching pair of jeans
Washington Park High School Principal Jeffrey Miller wore the jeans at school.
— -- Washington Park High School Principal Jeffrey Miller describes sophomore students Laron Franklin and Jaisjuan Brown as being “like two peas in a pod.”
So when Miller saw the two best friends walking the halls of the Racine, Wisconsin, high school in matching, white-splattered jeans, he got a good laugh.
“I poked some fun at them, like, ‘Matching jeans. Please tell me you planned that,’” Miller told ABC News. “It was impossible to miss them walking down the hall in the same pants.”
When Laron, 15, and Jaisjuan, 16, joked that they were going to buy Miller a pair, the principal said he had a “drop the mic moment.”
“I said, ‘You will never catch me in those,’” Miller recalled. “They said, ‘What size are you?,’ and I said, ‘38/30,’ kind of like a drop the mic moment, and I walked away.”
Just a few hours later, Miller was paged to a classroom during the students’ lunch hour. Inside the classroom were Laron and Jaisjuan holding a pair of the same jeans in Miller’s size.
The two students, who were in class and not available for comment Thursday, were aided by teachers who donated money and left campus during a break period to buy the jeans at a nearby mall.
“I just started laughing and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’” said Miller, who then dutifully changed into the jeans.
The trio wore their matching jeans for the rest of the school day, even surprising students in the 1,600-student school’s cafeteria.
“The kids were just dying,” Miller said
Miller, in his first year as principal of the school in his hometown of Racine, said he thought the March 30 incident would be a funny memory for the student body and not much more. He quickly learned the power of social media when a student tweeted a photo of the trio that went viral.
“The biggest lesson, apart from social media, is how important our relationships are with students and how much they mean to those kids,” Miller said. “The kids love it when you take an interest in them and pay attention to them.”
He added, “It’s why I show up every day.”
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