One of my stated goals in life is to never spend a minute in a courtroom. However, if I had a child at El Camino High School in Oceanside, CA, I would be suing the teacher's lounge out of the district and the donut holes out of the CHP. On a Monday morning last month, 20 classrooms received visits from uniformed California Highway Patrol officers who informed them that 26 of their classmates had been killed in drunk driving accidents over the weekend. As was to be expected, many of the students became hysterical. But here's the catch — it was a joke. Ha ha, fooled you! The plan was to keep the hoax up all day and announce the deception at a lunchtime rally. The best laid plans of mice and men… Turns out the students were so traumatized by the hoodwink, many teachers began telling them the truth. Though, not all. Especially students who weren't in the one of the twenty classrooms "participating" in the "lesson" — these students heard about their fellow classmates' deaths in the hallway between classes and had all day to ruminate on them. One 15-year-old, who I am sure speaks for both the school district and the cops, puts it this way, "You feel betrayed by your teachers and administrators, these people you trust. But then I felt selfish for feeling that way, because, I mean, if it saves one life, it's worth it." Oh yeah, totally worth it.
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That’ll teach you to trust the authorities.
So. Kind of a false flag operation – on a local level. Sweet. I swear they must be putting something in the water. We just get dumber all the time. This makes Reefer Madness look so innocuous.
Now. Back to cars.
What ever happened to encouraging kids not to DWI by showing them gruesome crash scene photos?
Horror movies, video games, & the internet desensitizes kids to that kind of gore.
This ‘hoax’ is much more effective than the lameness they pulled when I was in high school of having students faces painted white and we weren’t allowed to communicate with them.
Now if we can use this kind of tactic against other types of bad driving. Pull a guy out of work and say he was killed in a road rage incident. That would be priceless.
How else do you think the CHiPs gets their “epic lulz”?
Sorry, can’t read today.
As previously noted, the lesson was not to trust the government. I think it was well taught.
It makes me glad we homeschooled ours. That kind of manipulative crap is going way, way over the line.
What incredible arrogance. It’s a school. A school! What happened to long division? To balancing a checkbook? To geography? How is it within the mission of primary education to screw with the emotions of the student body by lying to them about the most grave topic imaginable?
It’s almost as if the administration thinks it’s some sort of game, and that this trauma will actually be internalized as “let’s not drink,” rather than “to hell with you people for lying to me.” The responsible party should not, must not, retain employment.
Wow. I will be very disappointed if this doesn’t come back and bite at least someone in the ass.
Landcrusher: As previously noted, the lesson was not to trust the government. I think it was well taught.
I’ll third that. That august newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, yesterday editorialized that the Supreme Court’s upholding of the Constitution regarding Guantanamo prisoners would result in more American deaths by terrorists. Ordinary falls and the flu kill around 27,000 of our countrymen every year, year in and year out, yet we don’t seem to have any government-sponsored “War on Falls” or “War on the Flu”. Scare tactics are the tool of tyranny.
wow. just wow. Makes me wonder if the police want kids to hate them.
To widen the scope of blame, I wonder who these 26 students are. They must have intentionally been absent from school that day. Why would anyone do that to their classmates?
seoultrain:
They did it for the lulz.
My high school had a program like that. They had a group of kids going from room to room announcing so-and-so died in a DUI accident. Of course, it was the popular people. However, our school was a little smarter (although the students weren’t) and had a guy dressed as the grim reaper following the CHP and the students around making the announcements. However, some students didn’t notice the ridiculous grim reaper figure and broke out in hysterics.
On the football field, they had set up two crashed cars and showed a 10-15 minute video on a giant projector screen, a student-produced video of the events leading up to the car accident. Two girls went drinking in the park and one decided to drive, but crashed into another car…then as the video ended, they directed the attention to the car crash where some two students got Jaws-of-Life’d and out of the car and airlifted somewhere.
Then we were given a speech about drunk driving, etc. It got us out of class and all, though, so it was kind of neat.
CHP meet IIED.
Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress
Sounds like something George Bluth and J. Walter Weatherman would have done.
“…And THAT’S why you don’t drink and drive!”
My small-town volunteer ambulance corps participates each year, on the June day of the senior prom, in a staged production at the local high school that presents a very effective consequences-of-drunk-driving lesson. Nobody is under the illusion that it’s real, but the thing is so realistic that it has literally brought tears to my eyes at times, and I’m a comparatively hardened EMS guy who has been doing this work for eight years and has seen plenty of high-speed New York State Thruway catastrophes.
A local bodyshop sets up two wrecks in a collision situation in the high-school parking lot, the high school’s drama club provides six or eight gory-makeup kids, the cops are there, the ambulance, a helicopter from the area medevac provider, the coroner, a hearse from the local funeral home…everything is done exactly as it would be in a real accident–Jaws of Life opening the cars, the injured extracted, the dead removed behind blocking tarps and zipped into body bags, the cops cuffing the drunk driver, the helo taking away the kids who need to go to the trauma center…
It’s interesting to watch the kids who are all sitting on the grassy berm next to the parking lot. They start out joking and fooling around, glad to be missing a class for this silliness, but by the time it’s over, with a woman cop narrating the whole thing over a PA system, their eyes are as big as saucers and some are actually crying. It’s hokey but effective: we used to have a crash a year on prom night, but now, at least on that evening, nobody screws up.
# Landcrusher :
June 14th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
As previously noted, the lesson was not to trust the government. I think it was well taught.
Hmmm – a bit too broad a conclusion I think Landcrusher.
Be wary and try to use you own judgement, I agree with – but having kids (anyone) jumping up and calling bs on any official announcement is not in anyone’s interests.
This sounds to me like some idiot(s) have taken what is probably a really good idea properly done (see Stephan Wilkinson’s post above)and turned it into a counter productive disaster. There is a group of responsible people here with a lot of explaining, apologizing and “making good” to do.
Ghillie,
The government officials in the story lied to the children. Thus, the lesson was not to trust the government. It really is that simple.
I didn’t actually state that one should not trust the government, but I might have implied it. I recommend hearty skepticism over out and out disbelief.
This is not unlike that show, “Scared Straight”, where they would take some at-risk (gotta love that term, so one-dimensional) youths to a prison for a day…don’t know if it ever REALLY worked, and I’m not sure we’ll ever know if this school stunt will work.
Bad taste, yes.
A “suable” offense? I doubt it. Aside from the hysterics and tears, nobody was financially or physically damaged.
Now, if one of the kids, in his or her intense trauma, had had a heart attack when the fake news was dropped on them, that might be a different matter.
If I were in the junior class of this high school, I’d start searching for a troubled kid of one of the teachers.
Then, next year, I’d bribe / pay this kid for use of his cell phone. Then I’d have some deep voiced adult play ‘policeman’ and call this teacher from the kid’s cell and ‘explain’ that her child was in a “serious accident” and is unable to talk and that she should “come to the hospital” immediately before “it’s too late.”
Cuz you’ve got to ‘educate’ parents about the dangers of letting their kids act irresponsibly. Sure, there will be drama, hysterics, tears, and (maybe) fear induced vomiting. But hey, you’ve got to “save the children”. And if “saves one life, it’s worth it.”
ihatetrees,
Exactly. Turnabout is fair play afterall, right?
Yeah, but two wrongs don’t make a right.
What if the teacher has a heart attack or causes an accident, injury, or death on the way to the “hospital?” Or maybe a heart attack while driving to the hospital, resulting in a multi-vehicle crash?
It’s human nature to feel justified to pull one over on the teacher. But it would be an empty feeling, and it could result in a REAL TRAGEDY…which, up to this point, has not occurred, correct?
No, THIS is not worth escalation. This is not some television show where people won’t be impacted in unforeseen ways.
We should make the distinction between those things that ARE worth it (such as proper punishment for serious anti-social crimes such as assault, robbery, or murder) and those things that should just stop here and now.
The original offense may not be something that the kids or their parents could press charges on, but the teachers and organizers could still be penalized or maybe even removed from their positions of authority.
That community should coordinate and organize. Bring public pressure to the school board and the police department, and see what happens.
A suspension would get the point across to the offenders that bad behavior such as this is unacceptable to that community. A dismissal would get the point across to everybody, including the remaining and/or replacement police or school administrators.
And lest you think that suspension or dismissal is not harsh enough, consider this: It may be very difficult for the punished to set their careers straight or to find new jobs afterward, given their reasons for punishment or dismissal.
So that is probably all that’s needed at this point. Again, nobody has died or been injured as a result of original offense.
But beyond that, this should stop here and now. In this thing, what we need are people who are more responsible and level-headed. I think people should control their natural urge of “get-back-itis” and do the RIGHT thing going forward.
Zoom,
I don’t believe Trees was actually advocating the turnabout, only using it to demonstrate the bad judgement of the stunt pulled by the authorities.
Were a student to pull something like that, they would certainly get in deep trouble with the exact same people who did the exact same thing to them. That’s the point Tree’s is making. They should have applied the Golden Rule.
Landcrusher:
Were a student to pull something like that, they would certainly get in deep trouble with the exact same people who did the exact same thing to them. That’s the point Tree’s is making. They should have applied the Golden Rule.
Yes. That was my point. I should have made it more clear. I did advocate impersonating a law officer, which is a serious offense, and is never justifiable.
ZoomZoom:
A suspension would get the point across to the offenders that bad behavior such as this is unacceptable to that community. A dismissal would get the point across to everybody, including the remaining and/or replacement police or school administrators.
I agree that would be ideal. However, we’re talking about California. I doubt the teacher union’s Nomenklatura will allow much punishment. And anything proposed will get tied up in courts for years.
Cops tend to have higher standards. Suspensions or head’s rolling wouldn’t surprise me.
I think ihatetrees’ point is that the actions of the police and the teachers amounted to terrorism. If a person calls in a false bomb threat, even if the intention is to create preparedness for the bomb, that person is arrested and tried as if he were doing the same as calling in a bomb threat.
Just because it is done under the color of authority doesn’t justify it anymore than false imprisonment is justified under the color of authority. One of the founding principles of this country was to eliminate this sort of capricious “It’s ok if I do it, because I’m a duke, and you’re not” nonsense.
Although their motives were certainly positive, the action was wrong. The CHP personnel (including whatever idiot authorized it) and the teachers should be suspended from their jobs.
If you or I saw a flaw in airport security and proceeded to demonstrate the flaw by bringing a fake shoulder-fired missile to the end of the runway, we would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, no matter that our motivation was good. “Authority”, no matter who it is, must live by the same set of rules.
Otherwise, imagine that Homeland Security wanted to alert people to the dangers of terrorism, and pulled similar stunts on people.
Their hearts were in the right place, but their heads were up their asses.
Of course, as has been said, kids are so desensitized to the awful consequences (blood, gore and death), that the “authorities” felt they had to up the ante…
If kids are so insensitive to potential tragedy, then maybe their parents should reflect on the lessons that they did not instill in their tadpoles.
@Brian Tiemann:
That Arrested Development reference was great.