Young children cower as teachers stage prank with fake gunman If you're going to play a prank on a group of sixth-grade students, the last thing you want to do is warn them that a gunman is on the loose. This is sure to evoke deep-seated fears and prompt widespread panic in the wake of recent school shootings. Yet that's exactly what a group of teachers decided to do last week during an overnight visit to a state park in Tennessee. "The lead teacher told the students and other adults that there were people somewhere in the park shooting guns but they were not shooting people; they were driving around playing," Scales Elementary School says in a statement posted on its website. "He added that the Park Ranger had advised him to tell everyone to take cover as a precaution." Then, while the 69 children were crying and cowering on the floor, "a teacher wearing a hooded sweatshirt pulled on a locked double door, pretending to be a suspicious subject in the area," according to The Daily News Journal, a Gannett newspaper. The prank outraged some parents and students. “I was like, ‘Oh my God,’” Shay Naylor, 11, tells the local paper. “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.” The assistant principal who was in charge of the trip tells the Associated Press that the mock attack was intended to be a learning experience for the students. But the school, led by a graduate of Virginia Tech, has apologized to the parents. The principal says the prank "involved poor judgment." ____________ Boy, talk about reality teaching!
Not much different to a surprise fire drill, is it? Or would you prefer some nice little video game where the little bastards would know that nothing bad could happen to them? Baron Max
