Teachers Stage Fake Gun Attack During School Trip

[Woodmonkey]

None of the teachers who participated in this, IMO, should ever be trusted with children again. They demonstrated abysmal judgement. Let the lawsuits begin!

Teachers Stage Fake Gun Attack During School Trip

Situation 'Involved Poor Judgment'

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."

The Source

A follow-up story

School district says fake gun attack was a prank

MURFREESBORO, Tennessee (AP) -- A teacher and assistant principal who frightened sixth-grade students on a class trip by telling them a gunman was on the loose were staging a prank, a spokeswoman for the schools said.

The school district's statement reversed earlier statements by the assistant principal that it was planned as a learning experience.

Teacher Quentin Mastin came up with the prank, said Murfreesboro City School District spokeswoman Cheryl Harris. It was his turn to tell a scary story to 69 sixth-graders from Scales Elementary School who were on a weeklong trip at Fall Creek Falls State Park.

He decided to pretend there was someone shooting a gun. The children were called into the common area and told there were two men driving around shooting randomly. Then a teacher told the students to "do a code red" -- a school emergency drill -- and they got under the tables and turned off the lights.

Another teacher drove a car up to the building and flashed the headlights while a third put a sweat shirt over her head and rattled the doors. That's when some of the children started crying.

"They never meant for it to get carried to the point it did," Harris said.

When teachers realized some of the children were really scared, they turned on the lights and told them they had just been pretending.

"They took the opportunity to say, 'This was a prank, but if it had been an emergency, you did the right thing,"' she said.

Assistant principal Don Bartch had been quoted in newspapers over the weekend portraying the incident as a planned learning experience. "We got together and discussed what we would have done in a real situation," he said.

Harris said that discussion occurred, but not as part of a drill. Bartch, reached at his home, said he concurred with her version of events.

The school district announced Monday that Mastin and Bartch had been suspended without pay for the rest of the school year, which ends June 1. The other teachers who participated were not disciplined.

Jessica Giles, an assistant professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University who studies the consequences of violence and trauma on children, suggested that regardless of whether the incident was a drill or a prank, the effect on the children would probably be the same.

It is reasonable to expect that at least some of those students might suffer from "increased amounts of fear about violence and school shootings and increased distrust for authority figures," she said.

"If it was a prank or a learning experience, does it matter?" she asked. "Can you clean up later?"

School principal Catherine Stephens held a meeting Saturday with parents who were upset by the prank. The children who were on the trip were offered counseling, Harris said, "and the counselor said the children were upset because their teacher was not going to be there for the end of school."

The Source

[leobold1]

Situation 'Involved Poor Judgment'

Ladies and gentlemen...We have a winner.

And for this we award the Understatement of the Year!

Prank or "learning experience" these people are morons.