by Dave Boehler
for The Beacon

It’s mid-April, and Kevin Butters still laughs about what happened on the first of the month.

“They got me pretty good,” the Plymouth High School science teacher said. “I actually forgot it was April Fools until I walked in and then I remembered very quickly that it was that day.”

Thousands of brightly-colored sticky notes were plastered everywhere. On the whiteboard. The floor. Doors. The desk. Even the fish tank.

“I said a few words to myself because there were a lot of sticky notes in there,” Butters said. “But then I just started laughing. There was even a sticky note on my door that said April Fools on it.

“So I knew something was going to be up as soon as I opened the door. And sure enough, everything was everywhere. They had chairs flipped over, things moved around.”

Butters, who graduated from Plymouth in 2006, says he is all for a good-natured, nobody-gets-hurt April Fools Day joke. He even feels if the right opportunity calls for a prank, there’s no need to wait until April 1.

Like the one time in high school when Butters filled his friend’s locker full of golf balls.

“I jammed something in the top so that the door was open,” he said. “I took a piece of cardboard to make a funnel and let in hundreds of golf balls in the locker. It was just something cheap at St. Vinny’s we could buy, like a potato sack full of golf balls for like five bucks.”

Butters, however, ranks the sticky notes as probably the best prank anyone has done to him.

He taught in West Bend and Green Bay prior to coming to PHS this year, and has had students put saran wrap over lab sinks. But nothing like this.

“This had the most planning and the most wreaked havoc on my room,” Butters said. “I’ve had several pranks played throughout the years and I’ve done several, but this was well orchestrated.”

In fact, Butters, who also serves as an assistant coach for the football and track teams, still is unsure how the students got in his locked room.

“They were in cahoots with someone here that could let them in,” he said. “It makes me laugh that they’re comfortable enough to do something like that.”

To top it off, the culprits were all freshmen in Butters’ various biology classes, and he thinks it took about three hours for them to do the job.

Cleanup took the entire school day, however, as Butters gave students extra credit for every 100 sticky notes they picked up.

“After 10 kids came up to me, it didn’t even make a dent,” he said.

The last couple hundred notes were collected in his final class and three bins were full of pink, orange and blue pieces of paper by the end of school.

Next year, Butters can only hope for a room full of balloons like one of his fellow teachers encountered two weeks ago.

“You can pop those,” he said. “Sticky notes, you had to pick up every single one.

“I’ll get them back at some point. I’ve got three more years to do it.”