In schools across the country on Tuesday, some administrators stopped class in the early afternoon to broadcast breaking news.
“Hey hey Chargers, I hope that you’re having a wonderful day. I come to you with some really, really important news,” said a staff member at Cor Jesu Academy, a girls’ Catholic high school in St. Louis, in a video posted to TikTik on Tuesday.
“Miss Taylor Swift is engaged to Travis Kelce.”
America’s reigning pop princess announced her impending marriage to Kelce, a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, via an Instagram post at 1 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday—when many teachers and students were in classes as the 2025-26 school year kicks off across the U.S.
“Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” read the Instagram caption, as the opening bars of Swift’s song “So High School” played in the background. The post racked up over 30 million likes by Wednesday midday.
For Natalie Gorla, the Cor Jesu Academy staff member who made the announcement in the school’s TikTok, seeing the post prompted a core memory.
In an interview, she recalled a similar pop culture watershed moment from her youth that caused an uproar when it happened during the school day: When Zayn Malik left the boy band One Direction.
“That’s going to be this for those girls,” she remembered saying to Kathleen Pottinger, the school’s dean of student life, before jokingly posing the question: “Do you think we could interrupt class and tell them?”
Pottinger, the other staff member in the TikTok video, said yes.
“I saw this as a 3-minute moment of joy,” she said, in an interview with Education Week. “I was like, ‘Why wouldn’t you do this?’”
Amid cellphone bans, teachers break the news to students
It’s hard to overstate Swift’s cultural impact.
Her nearly two-year-long Eras Tour, which culminated last year, grossed a record $2 billion. Half of Americans say they’re fans of the singer, according to a 2024 Harris Poll.
That same poll shows Millennials are most likely to claim the Swiftie label, but Swift has a large school-age fanbase, too. Teachers have used her lyrics as an entry point into poetry lessons, and her impact on the U.S. economy as a way to teach about concepts such as supply and demand or gross domestic product.
“For many, many years, we had our open house on the same Sunday every single year. But last year, it fell on the Eras Tour in Indianapolis,” said Christin Lux Connors, Cor Jesu Academy’s director of marketing and communication. The concert was close enough to St. Louis that students were going. “We switched the Sunday.”
Other TikTok videos show school staff sprinting to one another’s classrooms to relay the news, teachers telling their students who then erupt into cheers, or groups of girls dancing in hallways or crowded around phones.
In many of the videos, phones were conspicuously absent—evidence of the rise in cellphone bans or restrictions in schools across the country.
“Since you all cannot be on your phones, you may not know this yet,” one school staff member says in a video announcing the news over the school’s intercom.
On X, one teacher wrote that no students mentioned the news, even after it broke at the beginning of the class period. “And that’s how [I] know the cell phone ban is good for learning,” he wrote.
In this low-tech environment, some educators took the task of spreading the word especially seriously.
“My dad works at a school that banned phones,” wrote one commenter on another TikTok video of school staff announcing the engagement news. “He was like Paul Revere for the Swifties.”
