What kind of sick and twisted staff member of an elementary school would stage a fake gunman for six graders? YOU HEARD THAT RIGHT! They staged a “fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.”
Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.
The mock attack Thursday night was intended as a learning experience and lasted five minutes during the weeklong trip to a state park, said Scales Elementary School Assistant Principal Don Bartch, who led the trip.
“We got together and discussed what we would have done in a real situation,” he said.
But parents of the sixth-grade students were outraged. (Watch student recount incident, mother react)
Now think back when you were in six grade, and imagine how you would have reacted and felt if your teachers told you a gunman was running loose and this was not a drill. Imagine if one of the teachers put on a hooded sweat shirt and pulled on the locked door to the room you were hiding in. Try to imagine being in that room as a six grader with the lights turned off as you hid under a table, thinking you were about to die.
“The children were in that room in the dark, begging for their lives, because they thought there was someone with a gun after them,” said Brandy Cole, whose son went on the trip.
—snip—
During the last night of the trip, staff members convinced the 69 students that there was a gunman on the loose. They were told to lie on the floor or hide underneath tables and stay quiet. A teacher, disguised in a hooded sweat shirt, even pulled on a locked door.
After the lights went out, about 20 kids started to cry, 11-year-old Shay Naylor said.
What the hell is wrong with those people? Have we not seen enough fear mongering to last for a long time to come? It’s fine to teach the kids a lesson and make them safer if something was to happen, but this is plain stupid and insane. What happens to those kids now? What will this do to them now that those teachers chose to use tactics that are not only “poor judgment”, but criminal?
Idiots.
This is stunning. I hope the whole town and state raise a stink about this, and those students are nevermore subject to the authority of those ignorant fools. All of whom, including Ms. Stephens should lose their jobs.
When I was in sixth grade threats were considered crimes of assault. I don’t know about Tennessee. Stories like this really enrage me.
When I was in elementary school, it was during the height of the Cold War and the whole Cuban Missle crisis (which I remember nothing about). I do remember air raid drills, however, where they told us how to take cover under our desks (in case the windows blew in from a blast), and of course, fire drills, where we would practice how to leave the building quickly and meet up in a specific place outside to be accounted for.
We knew they were drills (I don’t recall how much we knew about the reason for having them), so we simply did what we were instructed to do. But it meant that had a real emergency ever happened, we would have had some pre-arranged, familiar set of procedures to follow.
There is absolutely NO excuse for TERRORIZING children with the ridiculous excuse of “preparing them” for a real emergency. If you want to train them in emergency procedures, you do it as a non-threatening drill — do that a few times, they will remember what to do should a real emergency come up. All these children will remember is being scared out of their wits and that it was the teachers they trusted who did it to them. How will they ever be able to really trust those teachers again?
That is a dismissal-worthy offense for a teacher, IMHO, and I don’t say that lightly. And yes, criminal and abusive. I would pull my kids out of that school if those teachers were NOT fired.
This illustrates why apes are pissed off at Darwin.
From today’s local newspaper:
Parents rally for two educators suspended over prank
I am so tired of hearing “and I’ll have to live with this for the rest of my life”. So will the victims.
Even as just a prank, it’s a serious breach of trust… and if the kids were on a field trip, away from home or the familiar classroom, they are even more dependent on the teachers for emotional/mental security as well as physical.
Compare this incident to the one of the teacher in Texas who was FIRED for taking her kids on a pre-approved field trip to an art museum, where the children were exposed to nude statuary…
It’s an extreme example of our national ductape and plastic sheeting psychosis.
Risky move, with schools these days the kids might have pulled the handguns out of their desks and opened fire.