What were they drinking?

After Virginia Tech, when I said I needed to teach H.o.p. how to duck and run, I certainly didn’t have anything like this in mind.

Via Raw Story…

Faculty fakes gunman attack on crying 6th graders
RAW STORY
Published: Monday May 14, 2007

A teacher and assistant principal at a Tennessee elementary school staged a fake gun attack on frightened students during a class trip, sparking outrage among parents, according to a report from CNN’s Newsroom.

According to school board member Lon Nuell, the prank was poorly timed. “Ghost stories are standard, and you scare the kids out of their wits,” said Nuell. “But this was very unfortunate timing, if the timing would ever be good for this sort of thing, this was not it,” referring to the Virginia Tech shootings that killed 33 students and professors in April.

According to one student who participated in the trip, Dalton Brown, the assistant principal instructed the students to get under desks and said that they had a “code red” – reserved for when an individual is in possession of a gun, knife, or bomb. The school later issued a press release classifying the events as a “typical campfire prank.” According to Brown’s mother, the prank crossed the line.

“It’s just appalling that they would classify this as such a thing, because there’s nothing typical about what they did to our children,” said Brown. “The kids were underneath tables crying and praying to God and begging for their lives, thinking that they were gonna die and that they were never going to see their families again.”

Riiiiight. A “typical campfire prank.” What were they drinking when they came up with that explanation?

“Could work.”

Chug-a-lug.

P.S. Listened to the video and seems they’re also calling it a “planned” “educational drill”. How “planned” “educational drill” and “typical campfire prank” mesh together, I don’t know. Maybe they just mesh together like “e” is found in both phrases and they could thus meet in a crossword puzzle.

Gee, when I was a kid they would tell us they were mock drills.

P.P.S.

Tennessean.com has more details:

A teacher wearing a hooded sweatshirt pulled on a locked door, pretending to be a suspicious subject in the area.

The students were told to lie on the floor or crawl underneath tables and keep quiet. The lights went out, and about 20 kids started to cry, 11-year-old Shay Naylor said. Some held hands and shook.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God,’ ” Shay said Saturday afternoon as she recounted the incident. “At first I thought I was going to die. We flipped out. (A teacher) told us, ‘We just got a call that there’s been a random shooting.’ I was freaked out. I thought it was serious.”

and

Assistant Principal Don Bartch, who led the trip, said the entire scenario lasted about five minutes, after which the teachers gathered the students and explained it was a prank.

“We got together and discussed what we would have done in a real situation,” he said.

Several parents said they were troubled by the staff’s poor judgment.

“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.

“This was not a good experience,” said Alisha Graves, whose son attended. “Those kids were crying, and they were terrified.”

Brandy Cole said she found out about the incident shortly after her son returned home from the trip Friday afternoon.

“I was shocked,” said Cole, whose husband, Jimmy, immediately sent an e-mail requesting a meeting with Bartch.

Barbara Corbetta, whose child also went to Fall Creek Falls with the group, said she spoke to several different parents and kept hearing the same details — kids on the floor crying and begging for their lives.

“The circumstance that occurred involved poor judgment,” Stephens said. “My hope is that we can learn from this, and in the end, it will have a positive result of growth for all of us.”

Positive result of growth for ALL.

What? As in, “Kids, don’t follow the example of Assistant Principal, Don Bartch, when you grow up.”

I suppose at Scales Elementary they call that positive growth.