Posted on 05/13/2007 3:04:17 PM PDT by TornadoAlley3
MURFREESBORO, Tenn. -- 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.
"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.
Some parents said they were upset by the staff's poor judgment in light of the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech that left 33 students and professors dead, including the gunman.
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 locked door.
After the lights went out, about 20 kids started to cry, 11-year-old Shay Naylor said.
"I was like, 'Oh My God,' " she said. "At first I thought I was going to die. We flipped out."
Principal Catherine Stephens declined to say whether the staff members involved would face disciplinary action, but said the situation "involved poor judgment."
How would the “prank” have “gone right” in your view?
What pushed this over the line into a criminal assault is the “imminent fear” element of what they did.
If someone doesn’t see smoke or fire, and just hears the buzzer demanding evacuation of the building, then there’s no fear of “imminent injury” from the fire.
But telling the students that it’s “not a drill,” and having a disguised staffer come to the door and pull on it, is intentionally creating reasonable fear of imminent injury or death, and that’s a class A misdemeanor in Tennessee.
The teachers screwed up, pure and simple. They will pay for this mistake, as will the taxpayers.
Actually, we have 3 kids in the school right now that have anxiety disorders. Those kids are given warning of the fire drill before time and one is taken out of the building before it happens, and even then he paces back and forth wringing his hands with worry and saying "what if it's real this time - what if it's real this time."
Yes, and wouldn’t you want children to learn to react to a terrorist attack in the same calm manner as a fire drill. I use calm loosely here, because sometimes there’s an awful lot of giggling but that would be better than panic in the real thing.
I’m sure that not everything the teachers did was the optimal approach, but to assume in knee-jerk reaction that such drilling is inappropriate is simply wrong and ill-thought out.
I agree that these teachers are not the best teachers for hostage reaction training, but I am amazed that so many people think that just the idea of such training is inappropriate.
I disagree that all fire drills notify the participants. In the Air Force and in school I usually didn’t know. I was trained however to act as if it was real. I usually thought it was just a drill.
Maybe I fail to appreciate the Rio Linda crowd that needs to be spoon fed everthing.
This was not “training” or a “fire drill”... this was an admitted “prank” from the start that went way over the line. Only after the damage has been done are some calling it a “learning experience”.
I would work the over-night shift at a liquor store in South Central Los Angeles to scrape together enough money to not send my kids to public school.
What I got from his post was that the MIRVs had individual warheads of 1-3 MT each—not total throw weight.
When you factor in multiple MIRV targeting( or preMIRV—multiple missile hits per target) you got a whole lotta destruction going on.
See post 92. Depending on the yield and accuracy of the warhead, incineration couldn’t be ruled out.
Yep.
Keep reading down the thread.
Russians had 20 MT warheads, though, not in the 60s.
By that time, both sides easily had warheads in the range of 5MT to 10MT.
Even pre-MIRVs, independent missiles would have been targeting a city like NYC in multiple groups to ensure the target was obliterated.
The scenario at 12 miles was not unthinkable.
1MT was reached early on in the hydrogen game and surpassed quickly.
Oh, one other thing—at the time,most of us were in schools built of brick and wood frame constructed in the twenties and thirties.
Most schools built in the late fifties and sixties were modern in design and had a lot of aluminum frame window walls in keeping with contemporary architecture, with interior cinder block walls. Not the same protection as a poured concrete building.
I hope you never lost your ability to question things.
Most kids today worry about stuff like “what if my IPOD battery loses charge?”
I didn't say that such drilling is inappropriate. I said that the way in which this "drill" was done was a crime, an assault committed by the teachers against the students, under Tennessee law.
If they're going to conduct such "drills" they need to take that provision of the law into account when they plan them. This is another data-point in my theory that most liberals are a bunch of highly-educated morons.
There already are vacancies between the ears of the people in charge.
The Tennessee law says "reasonable fear" - someone with a mental illness doesn't fall into that category.
Not sure what point you are trying to make here. I agree with you 100% and I’ve already said that. The teachers were wrong. If they violated a law in addition to being wrong, then I assume they will be prosecuted. Sounds like there is enough evidence from the principal’s own admission that they will have a pretty tough time in court.
When we have practice intruder alert drills we always send a notice to the parents informing them about it, several days before the actual exercise.
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