High School Makes Up Story About Students Dying in Car Crash. To Teach Classmates a Lesson.
Unbelievable
A Wisconsin high school invented a story about a group of students dying in a car crash because of distracted driving and announced it over the PA system in order to teach everyone a lesson.
The intended lesson was probably don't text while driving. But the only thing the students at Brodhead High School learned was school administrators are sociopaths.
On Monday, the school announced that four students had been killed in a car crash, according to CBS Minnesota:
"A lot of our friends and fellow students actually started crying because they actually thought these people were dead, and so I think a lot of them actually called their parents in school too," Madison Trombley, a student at Brodhead High School, said.
It took 10 full minutes for the school to explain that the announcement was a "drill," of sorts, and that no one had actually died.
The superintendent and principal told local reporters that their intention wasn't to cause stress. Very few parents complained, they noted.
This experiment is an outrage that served absolutely no purpose other than to needlessly terrify people. The things that schools are willing to do in order to promote public safety are sickening, be they the "mock shootings" that Lenore Skenazy has written about, or fire drills conducted with no regard for students' well-being.
Yes, texting-while-driving is a serious problem that results in a lot of dead teenagers. Schools and authority figures should discourage it. This was an unfathomably dumb and ineffective way to do that.