Scaring Students Unnecessarily

I've reported lots of accidents, fatal and non-fatal, involving teen drivers and I take that stuff seriously (click on the Teen Drivers label below and you'll see some of them). I post items on those accidents in the hopes that other teens, looking for information, will read about them and learn something from them that might keep them out of an accident later. Reading about real events that have hurt or killed kids is a powerful tool to make teen drivers pay attention when they get behind the wheel.

Most of the high schools put on those fake accidents where they get a couple of crashed cars, make-up some kids and adults as victims, and then run an entire accident scenario in front of the assembled students. I hear they can be pretty effective, though many students don't take them that seriously.

A high school in Oceanside took things just a little too far:

OCEANSIDE, Calif. — On a Monday morning last month, highway patrol officers visited 20 classrooms at El Camino High School to announce some horrible news: Several 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 school assemblies, some students held up posters that read: "Death is real. Don't play with our emotions."

Michelle de Gracia, 16, was in physics class when an officer announced that her missing classmate David, a popular basketball player, had died instantly after being rear-ended by a drunken driver. She said she felt nauseated but was too stunned to cry.

"They got the shock they wanted," she said.

Some of her classmates became extremely upset, prompting the teacher to tell them immediately it was all staged.

"People started yelling at the teacher," she said. "It was pretty hectic."

Others, including many who heard the news of the 26 deaths between classes, were left in the dark until the missing students reappeared hours later.

Traumatizing kids that way is borderline cruelty, especially when the kids think someone they know has been killed. I think the school went way overboard with that exercise and opened themselves up to potential legal problems should some of the students have problems dealing with the trauma they felt. I'm all for getting the kid's attention, but not that way.