The rallying cry of “do it for the children” has grown to meme proportions to those who feel more comfortable at the defense table in the well.  In the past, those who don’t realize the joke have used it to induce something akin to traumatic stress, such as when police and MADD  drove high school students to hysteria believing that one of their own had died in a drunk driving accident as part of a designed program to scare them.

At Wolcott High School in Connecticut, they decided to play the Virginia Tech-card instead.  From Rick Green at the Hartford Courant :

At Wolcott High School one morning this week, an urgent announcement crackled over the intercom: a threatening intruder was in the building and students were told to immediately take refuge in classrooms.

Doors were locked and police, with dogs, moved in. Students stayed huddled in classrooms where they were told to stay away from the windows.

Only kidding.  No armed intruder.  No threat.  No one was going to be murdered. At least not that day.  You see, the dogs were there for an entirely different reason, and since the students were huddled in their locked classroom, not looking out the windows, they wouldn’t know.

But what sounded like a frightening situation was just a search for narcotics. Drug-sniffing dogs combed the school while students stayed in locked classrooms, believing that an attacker was roaming the halls.

Was there a plague of drug abuse at Wolcott High?  Were students overdosing in the hallways, necessitating such an extreme charade to cleanse the school of demon-drugs?

School officials told me it was a routine lockdown drill, the kind that schools are required to do.

“We wanted to practice,” said Superintendent of Schools Joseph McCary. “We said there was a lockdown with an intruder inside. Doors are locked, shades are drawn and the lights are turned off and students are told to move to a corner of the room.”

That’s a double charade, twice fooled. Not only was there no intruder, but no particular drug issue. It was just for practice.

Every fine play has rehearsals, including the passion play of school-wide lockdowns for drug searches under the guise of an armed intruder about to murder students.  What a knee slapper!

Not all parents got the joke, or appreciated the “routine” nature of the show.

“I don’t think the school administration and police department have any right to mislead these kids, under any circumstances, to conduct a public safety drill,” said Carl Glendening, a parent of two high school students. “The kids are told there is an intruder and there is a lockdown and then they see cops coming in with dogs.”

“Some kids were freaked out by it. The notion of Columbine was in the back of their minds,” Glendening said. “We didn’t think this through clearly.”

The school officials may not have the right, but they clearly have the authority.  They need to practice? They have the power. They need to bring in police with drug sniffing dogs? They have the power. Parents don’t like it?  They are the parents, at least during school hours, and extending longer and farther away with every passing court decision. 

The school superintendent, however, was not about to let some overly sensitive parents muck up their rehearsal.

Maybe there’s a few people who get nervous. When we say it’s a surprise drill, it’s a surprise drill,” she said. “We have a very active group of citizens against substance abuse.”

The drug search is “something that is good to do periodically. It says we don’t have drugs in the school,” she said. “Either way it’s a win-win. I know people get concerned … there seems to be an overreaction.”

McCary, the Wolcott superintendent, said they want to teach students to take their safety seriously, so making them think it was real was essential. “If you say it’s just a drill, would you move as quickly?”

But as Green notes, you don’t set the school on fire to run a fire drill.  Granted no one was hurt.  In fact, no drugs were found during the “practice” run of drug dogs through the hallways.  I wonder if anybody told the dogs it was just practice.  But the lack of recognition that they are screwing with children’s heads, in the name of protecting children from themselves, doesn’t seem to matter at all.

It’s not there weren’t lessons to be learned in all this, that school officials are liars, that police are happy to be part of the lying conspiracy, that no at Wolcott cares what the parents think of their children being used in a charade and that the things the fear will be used to scare them into compliance and obedience for the benefit of law enforcement.  This may not be an appropriate way to teach these things to students, but I bet it’s effective.

What makes these ploys so troubling isn’t that the high school students won’t survive the charade, but that they, the very target of so much devotion that they are invoked as the justification for the never ending parade of new laws to make their world perfect, are little more than props in the play.  School administrators show little concern for how the parents feel about their children being lied to, and even less for the students themsevles.

And these are the people in whom we repose trust to care for our children showing their best judgment.

H/T Radley Balko