At mine, on that day, they started it by announcing over the intercom one morning that a popular classmate had been killed by a drunk driver on the way into school. Even though it should have been obvious that’s not how it would really have been handled, it got the shock it was intended to get. A few people even ran out of classrooms crying. That was before everyone had cell phones.
I guess they wanted to make a point about the fatality rate statistic, too, though, so they kept going, announcing another person every however many minutes. It immediately became really obvious to everyone what was going on when they announced the second person. I think it lost more of its desired effect the more they continued.
We did the same. It was called every 15 minutes. They started with a teacher instead of a kid though. We also got the wrecked car and dead students. But they had the drunk driver teen live and show us them going through court and being sentenced to jail.
Yup. Caused minor PTSD in the actors and I was one of them. A bunch of students still drove drunk though…
So apparently I’m not a real American. Never had this happen
As an American who grew up in the 90s and 00s… what the fuck, this was a THING?!
As an American who grew up in the 90’s and 00’s…yes it was a thing… unfortunately.
Yeah they still have a staged “wreck” just outside of a nearby town. MADD is nutty when you realize they collect a fuck ton of money and have almost no legitimate way to spend it.
Nah at my high school we just had kids die in drunk driving accidents every year, usually multiple. I’d say we didn’t need a lot of theater around the topic, but well, then again…
My American high school did this in preparation for prom night. Two teachers would play the role of the parents, and they would tow a couple of totalled cars onto the football field. The entire school would be paraded out into the stadium to watch the police come and tell the parents their child was killed after driving under the influence.
The DJ at my senior prom played a song where the chorus said something along the lines of “Put your hands up if you’re an alcoholic”. Of course everyone (17 & 18 years old) threw their hands up and danced to that one.
Ours had some theater kid pretend to be dead for a week and did a fake memorial on the football field. They played it like he was actually killed while driving drunk.
I also remember not really caring cuz I didn’t know him, and wondered why the whole school had to pretend to care. I kinda wonder if it was puberty that made me not care or if I just ain’t got that empathy in me.
That’s very extreme lol.
There were a few deaths throughout my time in public school. I didn’t think too much about the people I didn’t know. Only 1 person that I was friends with, so I did attend his memorial at which i cried. I think its normal to not spend too much time thinking about the deaths of people you don’t know.
People die every day. I still feel bad for them and their families’ pain, but if you truly mourned each one, it’s all you’d be able to do.
It’s been 5 years and his friend is still pretending to be dead.
It is worth noting that this sort of thing was only done for a very brief period of time. It’s not like this is how all American schools have warned students since 1978.
Still hilarious when you look back on it.
2004, we made my buddy laugh when he was supposed to be playing dead and got in trouble lol
Making friends laugh when they are supposed to be still/silent is like… Half the reason to have friends. All thebsrupid charades we used to do whenever someone was on the phone with their parents or girlfriend lol. Or the moaning and making ridiculous comments loudly lol.
I don’t often remember highschool fondly but it happens once in awhile.
This never happened at my school. The school news channel did do a special on it after someone died from texting tho
We only had fire drills, where we had to casually follow our teacher outside, stand at the collection spot for ~10min, and then go back in and continue the lesson.
Besides the two times where the canteen burnt the lunch so bad the alarms went off, we once had a suspected bomb alarm during uni where we were told to stay away for a few days while investigations were on, the ones who didn’t need any of the instruments anyway. Turns out it was some depressed tween who made joke on reddit or tumblr about wanting to bomb the place.
Good times.
Another funny story – aside from the fire drills, we once had to evacuate an entire wing of the school because we were testing the energy released by various things (peanuts, paraffin, methylated spirits etc) by setting them on fire and seeing how long it took them to heat up some water to 100 degrees.
It was going fine, until we tried burning 25ml of paraffin, and someone set fire to the curtains in the lab. One moment there was a small pool of paraffin, next moment FIRE RAGING ON THE CURTAINS and the fire alarm ringing throughout the building.
That was quite entertaining.
(I haven’t even told you the story about the science teacher who cracked the plexiglass screen. You know the big thick screen they put up in front of “dangerous” experiments to protect the students?
Well the chemistry teacher was doing an experiment with fire and gunpowder and I think he mismeasured the amount he put in, because there was a flame and an explosion and the screen that was supposed to absorb the explosion and protect the students… not so much – it cracked and split in two. It didn’t shatter but it wasn’t entirely useful after that and the class ended a lot earlier than we were expecting.
So – funny story.
At my mum’s school (she taught at a different school than me and my siblings went to) they had regular fire drills. (We had them at our school as well).
But at my mum’s school the fire brigade sometimes took one or two students, or a teacher, aside and kept them inside the school during the fire drill, to test whether or not registers were being taken properly.
The idea being that when the register was taken, and little Susie Jones or Mister Smith (the biology teacher) wasn’t present, the responsible member of staff would alert the fire brigade and they would go back into the building to “search for the missing person”
However one year they decided to stop doing it, because apparently one of the firemen approached a third year girl (aged 13) and asked if she wouldn’t mind going into a cupboard with him, and she KICKED HIM IN THE LEG and ran away screaming about this creepy man who was trying to get her to go into a cupboard.
She attracted quite a lot of attention – most of the staff and almost all of the students – and they eventually calmed her down and explained what was going on. She was a little embarrassed but also quite proud of kicking him so hard.
So yeah – after that they stopped taking kids aside and kept it to taking staff aside because no one else wanted to get kicked.
That “… or no” at the end got me good.
Attended it as a student my senior year, 2005. Was aware of it in prior years too. I went to a school with ~3000 students, in a districting combining two towns of about 53k people.
I also attended it as a member of the ambulance crew and once right after graduation, and again about a decade later.
I think they only did that once every 4 years at the school I went to. They didn’t do any funeral stuff, just the crash scene part.
One year they had a student laying on the ground near a car and a firefighter accidentally stepped on her(thought she was one of the dummies?) and broke some of her ribs.
Didn’t do shit to stop drunk driving, nor did the victims of drunk drivers that had their lives changed in the accidents.
We had to wear goggles that simulated being drunk like that one episode of the Simpsons and then try to do basic tasks like walk from one point to another or whatever so they could show how it impaired your motor skills. But it backfired because they just really exaggerate the visual impairment you get from drinking, they’re basically putting on a really too strong pair of glasses. But we did several rounds and eventually got somewhat used to it, it was a big game of who could seem the least impaired, the message was completely lost on us, etc
And this is why I refuse to be a high school teacher. 😂
We got to wear some glasses that supposedly gave you drunken/on drugs vision. Everybody liked that.
