When I got caught poking around where I wasn't meant to in high school they recruited me to help out the systems administrator. I've heard similar stories from a lot of people in the industry.
I almost failed speech class in 8th grade because I arranged for a minor distraction in the hallway and then changed my teacher's desktop background to a pigeon while she was investigating. And then it became a sort of game, how many times can I get that pigeon up while she's helping someone on the other side of the room. I dunno why it made her so angry. I didn't read the article.
Is it story time? Our school had an ANSI art splash screen depicting the school's logo while the ancient token ring network did its thing on boot and login. Deep ASCII was making its rounds on the Internet. I had recently discovered AALib and like all kids with desktops in their bedroom, had a very large collection of very short porn videos on 1.44" diskettes. I did the obvious thing. No one ever knew it was me.
Wow, this sounds eerily similar to something I got in trouble for back in middle school. A fellow student saved his email password in the browser on our class's shared computer, so I changed his profile picture and deleted the saved password. For a while no one knew who had done it, and it was basically a non-issue, but after I bragged to an acquaintance and he ratted me out, the student whose account I'd tampered with went apeshit. Eventually, after a couple tearful meetings with the heads of school, I had to write a paper about penalties for "impersonating" someone online in Texas. I still think the brouhaha and ensuing punishment were bullshit, although I regret not just telling the other kid not to save his information so publicly.
I think "write a paper" is an entirely appropriate response for hijinks. "We'll show you, you little malcontent! Have more education!" It also likely taught you the important lesson about never bragging about malfeasance. I also think that this is exactly the sort of flier the ACLU needs to take to pick back a little at Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier. "Felony hacking" for reading a teacher's password is pretty much the proportionality doctrine in a nutshell.
Yeah, it's become my school's stock response to shenanigans, and it's kinda hilarious. One of my friends "stole a taco" (it was sitting, unmarked, on a table in the hallway; he ate it) and after he refused to apologize they made him write a paper about the value of respect. Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier is one of my least favorite SCOTUS cases of the last century. I wish the ACLU would fight it with something like this.