Mitch Stringer-USA TODAY Sports
The average high school yearbook is littered with quotes from songs chosen by students who found some sort of meaning in those lyrics. However, a principal at a learning institution in Florida may be out of a job over a controversy involving Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen.”
Students at Yale are credited with creating the first official yearbook with the bound retrospective that was published in 1806 (which featured silhouettes of students as opposed to the photographs that wouldn’t be invented for two more decades).
High schools around the United States started getting in on the action toward the end of the 19th century. Those yearbooks remain a beloved annual tradition, and they serve as de facto time capsules and historical documents capable of capturing the zeitgeist of the year they were published while being unified across time by the teenage awkwardness that radiates from their pages.
Students, teachers, and administrators usually get the opportunity to contribute to yearbooks in some way, and one principal at a school in the Sunshine State is claiming she was set up after being placed on leave due to some song lyrics she says she had nothing to do with.
The principal at Trout Creek Academy in Florida was placed on leave over a yearbook page featuring the lyrics to Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen”
Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” was released in the spring of 2014, but it took close to a year before it really took off en route to claiming the “Song of the Summer” crown.
The “Trap Queen” in question refers to the ride-or-die girlfriend of a drug dealer who sells crack cocaine, which the rapper said was inspired by an actual ex (Fetty Wap was also really about that life, as he spent three years in prison after pleading guilty to drug-related charges before being released at the start of 2026).
You might not expect any lyrics from that song to show up in a yearbook that was published in 2026, but according to St. John’s Citizen, that was the case with the one that was printed at Florida’s Trout Creek Academy and has seemingly led to its top administrator losing her job.
The outlet reports the yearbook in question features a quote credited to principal Katie O’Connell, a lyric from “Trap Queen” in the form of “Everybody hating, we just call them fans though!” While that was a fairly innocuous excerpt, it apparently riled up some parents who were not thrilled about the nature of the song it came from, which led to O’Connell being placed on administrative leave on May 20th over allegations of “inappropriate conduct.”
O’Connell says the quote in question was not in any of the proofs and other staffers approved before the yearbook was published. It’s unclear who was responsible, but a number of parents nonetheless lodged complaints, including some who asserted it was designed to “mock families who had previously raised serious concerns about issues at the school.”
The school has banned O’Connell from its grounds during a leave that is currently set to run until her contract expires on June 30th, and it has informed her that it will not be renewed for the upcoming academic year.