What a Buncha 'Tards

Awhile back Woozie was telling us about a program where people came into a classroom dressed as the grim reaper and escorted a student away, who was then considered dead. Everyone had to go through the motions of mourning, etc. etc. Government funded program of course. It was supposed to create awareness of drinking + driving = bad. The message itself is sound, and I understand it gets harder and harder to create a vehicle (no pun intended) that delivers a message so it is heard. But the delivery of this is retarded. It makes a mockery of a very real problem.

Well, apparently - the program called Every 15 Minutes, tweaked the delivery of their "message" with some unexpected results.

June 12 - On a Monday morning last month, highway patrol officers visited 20 classrooms at El Camino High School to announce some horrible news: Students had been killed in car wrecks over the weekend.

Classmates wept. Some became hysterical.
A few hours and many tears later, though, the pain turned to fury when the teenagers learned that it was all a hoax — a scared-straight exercise designed by school officials to dramatize the consequences of drinking and driving.

As seniors prepare for graduation parties Friday, school officials in the largely prosperous San Diego suburb are defending themselves against allegations they went too far.

At assemblies where speakers talked about the dangers of drunk driving, some students held posters that read: "Death is real. Don't play with our emotions."

Michelle de Gracia, 16, was in physics class when an officer announced her missing classmate David, a popular basketball player, died instantly after being rear-ended by a drunk driver. She felt nauseated but was too frozen to cry. "They got the shock they wanted," she said.

Some of her classmates were hysterical, prompting the teacher to tell them immediately the death was staged. "People started yelling at the teacher," she said. "It was pretty hectic."

Others, including many who heard the "news" between classes, were left in the dark until the 26 missing students reappeared hours later to enact a fatal traffic accident.

The stunt was a twist on a program called Every 15 Minutes, which was designed in the early 1990s, when someone was killed an average of once every 15 minutes in alcohol-related accidents. Here's how the program normally works: Students chosen to symbolize the dead are pulled out of their classes by someone in a Grim Reaper costume while their obituaries are read aloud.

A few hours later, they reappear in ghoulish makeup to enact a traffic accident at an assembly. Rescue workers whisk "victims" from a mangled car to a hospital or morgue. The "dead" then spend the night at a hotel isolated from friends and family before returning the next day for an assembly with parents and professional speakers.

At El Camino, the students who were in on the secret shunned the Grim Reaper skit.
"We didn't want kids laughing at it," said Michelle Molin, 17, a junior. "It's like Halloween."
El Camino officials agreed to try to give students the experience of real grief. They defend how they handled the exercise.

"They were traumatized, but we wanted them to be traumatized," said guidance counselor Lori Tauber. "That's how they get the message."

The school had counselors on standby to calm kids who were visibly upset but didn't anticipate the power of cell phones to spread the word.

Before class, a freshman who knew her sister was playing dead texted her friends to say the girl had been killed. Word spread quickly among the school's 3,100 students, many of whom clustered between periods crying. Even administrators who knew about the program thought there had been a terrible coincidence.

Perondi said the program students got the message.
"We did this in earnest," he said. "This was not done to be a prankster."
_____________

You know what... I woulda been fucking pissed too. It's one thing to create awareness, it's another to fuck with people and create trauma. A "just joking" or "we did it for your own good" isn't going to take away those hours of soul-rending sorrow.