All great observations on your end. I will addressed a couple of them from my own perspective. In Jr. High, I always carried my books in a oversize backpack because for whatever reason it was, my classrooms were always at the tail end of the school. I never had two classes anywhere near my locker and it was just added work...and pressure of getting to each class on time in the span of 5 minutes between periods. In High School though, all my classes were pretty much in the same vicinity of my locker and that afforded me the option of keeping all my books there and all I needed was the one book per class. So, I can and will give any HS movie that actually has students carrying just one at a time since it's not totally out of line of reality.

When it comes to proms and / or dances, I also give them as pass. As much as sex is a right of passage, the same can be said about School functions like dancers or parties. It's a part of the school culture and I think for a school movie not to have one would draw too much attention to itself. The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off do in fact get a pass because of the unique situation they are in. Both are about High School, and yet they really aren't if you think about it from a typical point of view of the characters as one is more or less a Group Therapy session and the other is about playing hooky.....far from school grounds.

The same goes for Cliques. You can't have a HS movie without them. I will point to The Breakfast Club again as a prime example. You have 5 kids each representing a specific 'Type'. There is a reason why TBC is tops in my book because they take cliches and make it about something so relatable while being totally original for the genre itself.