Went to a public high school! It was kind of a mess- LOTS of fighting, both boys and girls. Not really like . . . 'bullying' fighting mind you. I think there was a bit of a bullying problem but that was mostly seperate from the fighting and more psyhcological/non-physical.
Some of the pranks at school also were very unsafe. At some point there was a police officer on standby near the exit of the school and one in the cafeteria- not a huge fan of that, but I won't elaborate on that too much. It's not super unusual for schools in the US to have that. Very diverse school racially & culturally speaking, though a lot of the kids were weird to the Special Ed kids and most LGBT students weren't out. It also had a ton of students- so going to class was very much a struggle due to so many kids flooding the hallway, lol.
There were some renovations going on all throughout the four years, and some of the bathrooms were nearly unusable (not as in dirty, as in "some of the stall doors are literally missing.")
I think there was a vibe similar to that of Nick Rowler's school- there was a few levels of advancement when it came to classes, and there were never really any sentiments of "lol nerd" or anything. A lot of the very popular kids also had extremely good grades and were in only the top-level classes.
No uniform, but most kids were just in jeans & a t-shirt. Some girls wore PJ pants, or sometimes skirts if they were feeling fancy. Usually, it was just girls' hairstyles & makeup that were done up, though.
I did envy kids who went to private school at the time (see: the fighting lol) but . . . looking at the replies above, I'm not sure I'd necessarily like it too much better.