During her first week at Grady as a freshman more than three years ago, *Alexis walked into the courtyard after school and was literally swept off her feet by an older boy. The senior put her backpack in a tree and set her down on top of the hill, where two girls grabbed Alexis by her feet and dragged her down the hill toward the lower courtyard, leaving bloody scratches on her back.

At the beginning of her senior year, Alexis was finally ready to get even—by doing to freshmen what had been done to her.

“[Getting dragged] was one of the reasons I wanted to drag, because ever since then I’ve been like ‘revenge!’” Alexis said.

On the first and second days of school, Aug. 6 and 7, Alexis and her friends rounded up freshmen after school and herded them across the street to Piedmont Park. There, the seniors kept alive the Grady tradition of “dragging” by pulling the freshmen down a hill in the park’s meadow, adjacent to 10^th street. Seniors took the unprecedented step of using zip ties to bind freshmen’s hands.

“Once we got over to Piedmont, the girls were like zip-tying [hands] and spraying silly string and then one person got dragged and it just kind of got crazy, like three people getting dragged connected to each other,” senior Austen Denenny said.

The event prompted two parents and a woman who was jogging in the park and is not affiliated with Grady to contact administrators. In response, assistant principals Rodney Howard and David Propst called a senior meeting on the third day of school. Howard said anyone caught dragging freshmen could be expelled and even face charges for assault, harassment or false imprisonment due to the use of zip ties as a restraint.

“Yes, you will be sent to jail because you are of age,” Howard said at the meeting. “If you get caught, seniors, I promise you we will do whatever we can to remove you from Grady High School.”

As a result of the meeting, seniors eschewed the dragging they’d planned for the rest of the week, although freshmen had expected further hazing.

“[Freshmen] were all sitting over there across the street on the hill waiting for us [on Friday afternoon],” Denneny said. “But there were like two prisoner transport vans, cops, Coach Howard. I’m not going to go over there. But the fact that all the kids were just lined up there shows that the parents make way too big a deal, and the whole administration.”

The administration’s crackdown has prompted debate and discussion about Grady’s most visible hazing tradition, a ritual that almost always takes place with the consent of the intended victims. To some, being dragged is a mark of acceptance. To others, it’s a fate to be avoided. And to many at Grady, it’s largely irrelevant.

“Only white kids get dragged,” said *Jessica, a freshman who was not dragged.

English teacher Lisa Willoughby, who first came to Grady in the fall of 1983, said this was not always the case. During her first years as a teacher, dragging was more ubiquitous and visible, usually occurring during lunch on the hill extending from Charles Allen Drive down toward the practice field. At that time, Grady had about 500 students, most of whom had attended school together since the first grade.

“[Dragging] was pretty widespread,” Willoughby said. “Slowly but surely it became more of a white thing, that there weren’t very many African-Americans involved.”

Although dragging once occurred in a broader swath of Grady’s population, Willoughby said dragging victims have always been popular and well-liked members of the freshman class.

“It was almost a status symbol to get dragged,” Willoughby said.

Seniors and freshmen who participate in dragging said they feel this is still the case.

“The people they haze are the ones who are going to end up tops, socially,” said *Joshua, a freshman who was dragged.

Peggy Barlett, a professor of anthropology at Emory University, said dragging at Grady follows the general pattern of initiation rituals in primitive societies. In the first stage of such rituals, initiates are separated from the broader group. Next, the ritual itself is performed. Finally, initiates return to society with a new status. The process in which certain freshmen are drawn away from campus, then dragged, and finally allowed to complete the rest of the school year with a minimum of antagonism by seniors, fits this mold, Barlett said.

“The junior person, the initiate, is learning to accept humiliation, accept orders to do something they may not want to do, and to accept physical trauma to the body, a sort of unknown amount of roughness,” Barlett said. “And likewise at the other end the seniors are being asked to learn something too. They’re being asked to learn to inflict some physical harm on people, to think up humiliations for people. And maybe even to enjoy them.”

Barlett said the structure of an initiation ritual typically reflects the values of a society.

“Do what your bosses say, go along with the authorities in society, submit to the traditions,” Barlett said. “It feels to me like there are some echoes [in dragging] to those messages.”

Willoughby said an incident in the mid-2000s in which a student suffered severe injuries while being dragged prompted the administration to take a strong stance against dragging. Lily Muntzing was a freshman at Grady in 2005 and remembers seniors being arrested at school.

“In class the cops came in and arrested the kids who were involved, and put them in jail,” Muntzing said.

When Muntzing was a senior in the fall of 2008, she and her friends were warned by the administration about the potential disciplinary consequences of dragging, but decided to drag freshmen anyway to carry on the tradition.

“No one really cared about the threat because Grady has a lot of empty threats going on,” Muntzing said.

Muntzing said a male freshman who was dragged injured his back, prompting his mother to notify the school. The administration created a list of the names of everyone involved; Muntzing and her friends were on the list. Because administrators had not yet distributed student handbooks, which explained the punishments for offenses such as hazing, Muntzing and her friends were not severely punished.

“First, it was like we were going to be arrested. Then it was you’re getting suspended for 10 days. I think we got ISS for like a day or two,” Muntzing said.

Muntzing said she was not surprised dragging had continued despite students’ awareness of the potential consequences.

“No matter how hard administration works to buckle down, a tradition is something that’s kind of impossible to stop in a school,” Muntzing said.

Dragging occurred on campus to some degree in the fall of 2009, but by the fall of 2010 took place exclusively in Piedmont Park. Last year, in addition to dragging, seniors covered freshmen assembled in the park with flour, eggs and syrup. Denneny said he and his friends wanted to top that.

“Since we were juniors, the guys especially have been waiting and preparing I guess, like saying we’re going to go so much harder than the grades before us and just be a lot worse to the freshmen this year,” Denneny said. “And we were, I think.”

Alexis said senior girls held a planning meeting of their own over the summer.

“We met at someone’s house and we all just kind of brainstormed things,” Alexis said.

They intended to use the zip-ties to bind freshmen in one large group, then toss a pair of scissors into Piedmont Park’s meadow and force the freshmen to move as one to retrieve the scissors. Alexis said the arrival of senior boys at the park caused the situation to escalate.

“The boys came, and the boys started dragging before we really got anything done,” Alexis said. “What we didn’t think about was the zip ties were around their wrists. The objective was not to cause harm, it was to humiliate them and initiate them.”

Freshman Haley Hays estimated that on Tuesday, Aug. 7 about 20 freshmen were zip-tied in pairs and dragged two at a time down the hill. Seniors zip-tied Hays to *Rachel, another freshman, at the wrists, and sprayed them with silly string.

“They took my legs and dragged me down the hill, with Rachel behind me, like tagging along,” Hays said.

Joshua said the dragging had been no more severe than he had expected. He said the zip ties on Tuesday were fairly easy to break apart, but the spiky grass in the park had scratched his back and caused bleeding.

Assistant principal Rodney Howard said phone calls from parents caused the administration to involve the Atlanta Police Department, which he said stationed plainclothes police officers in the park each afternoon after 3:15.

“I don’t think [seniors] understand the severity of it,” Howard said. “Something that seems as simple as dragging someone down a hill could go wrong, someone could get dragged over a razor or needle.”

Howard said he became particularly concerned about the potential of hazing to escalate when he read about the hazing-related death of Robert Champion, a drum major at Florida A&M University. Champion died on Nov. 19, 2011, after participating in one of the marching band’s hazing traditions, in which members walk from the front to the back of a bus as seated upperclassmen beat them with fists, kicks and drumsticks.

“Something that was seen as just a ritual turned very serious due to the fact that a young man lost his life,” Howard said.

Denneny said he understands parents’ and administrators’ concerns about the zip ties, and feels no one should be allowed to beat freshmen in the halls during school hours. But hazing, he said, should be a part of high school.

“It shouldn’t be a big deal to drag them or emotionally terrorize them while they’re still freshmen,” Denneny said.

Alexis said although seniors hadn’t dragged freshmen since the senior meeting, they had begun discussing ways to make up for lost time.

“We’re not looking to hurt [freshmen] but we gotta do something else,” Alexis said. “No one wants to be the class that breaks the tradition.”

*At source’s request, name has been changed to protect source from potential disciplinary consequences.