Posted on 06/02/2008 6:43:43 AM PDT by TornadoAlley3
El Camino teens face heavy emotions brought about by drunken-driving dramatization
OCEANSIDE – It was an elaborate hoax, but 36 students at El Camino High pulled it off with potentially life-saving consequences.
The result was a soberingly realistic dramatization about the dangers of drinking and driving, delivered with surprising professionalism. Many juniors and seniors were driven to tears – a few to near hysterics – May 26 when a uniformed police officer arrived in several classrooms to notify them that a fellow student had been killed in a drunken-driving accident.
The officer read a brief eulogy, placed a rose on the deceased student's seat, then left the class members to process their thoughts and emotions for the next hour.
The program, titled “Every 15 Minutes,” was designed by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Its title refers to the frequency in which a person somewhere in the country dies in an alcohol-related traffic accident.
About 10 a.m., students were called to the athletic stadium, where they learned that their classmates had not died. There, a group of seniors, police officers and firefighters staged a startlingly realistic alcohol-induced fatal car crash. The students who had purportedly died portrayed ghostly apparitions encircling the scene.
Though the deception left some teens temporarily confused and angry, if it makes even one student think twice before getting behind the wheel of a car while intoxicated, it is worth the price, said California Highway Patrol Officer Eric Newbury, who orchestrates the program at local high schools.
“When someone says to me, 'Oh, my God, you're traumatizing my children,' I'm telling them, 'No, what I'm doing is waking them up,' ” said Newbury, whose father was killed by a drunken driver.
“If you don't do your job as a parent ... the only thing I can do is either arrest them and take them to jail or scrape them off the ground and tell you, 'I'm so sorry.' ”
Standard speeches don't usually get the desired reaction, Newbury said.
“If I sit there and lecture somebody in a nice way, it's going to go in one ear and out the other,” he said. “In today's world, where they have all sorts of gore and fantastic things that kids can access on the computer, if you want to compete with that, you have to jar them emotionally.
“I want them to be an emotional wreck. I don't want them to have to live through this for real.”
A few teachers chose not to take part in the production. The ones who did monitored the situation closely. Students who appeared overly distraught were taken aside and told the death was not real.
Senior Brittany Bennett, 17, editor of the school newspaper, played one of the alleged deceased and took the role of a reporter at the accident scene.
Bennett said some students gradually began to discover what was happening on their own.
“Some people were comparing notes, text messaging each other, like, 'So-and-so died,' and 'so-and-so died,” she said. “The wheels were starting to turn.”
The 36 students who participated later attended a retreat at the Carlsbad Inn, where they tried on “beer goggles” that mimicked the sensation of having a .25-blood alcohol level.
Counselor Lori Tauber first approached the school and students about bringing the presentation to El Camino. Tauber's two daughters attend the school.
Tauber said she is aware that drinking and driving is occurring among the student population.
“I just know in my heart this was worth it,” she said.
Is it okay to lie to teach a lesson? Is it necessary?
Hope it helps. One of the high schools in my town just lost its FIFTH student this year, fourth to drunk driving.
It’s still lying. Not a good idea to get the police and school administrators in the habit of lying.
Not really news, though.
Raising the drinking age to 21 has been really effective hasn’t it?
MADD has become even more desperate in their neo-prohibition.
> It’s still lying. Not a good idea to get the police and
> school administrators in the habit of lying.
I agree.
Aside from the bolshevik theater aspect of this stunt, it may actually be a crime, since the police and school administration falsely reported deaths.
Maybe we should think about raising the driving age to 21.
Fine line. Biblically, Rahab lied about the whereabouts of the Joshua and Caleb. In times of War we’ve lied, well at the very least “deceived” the enemy to our advantage. Those that hid Jews during the Holocaust lied. I don’t think there’s a clear cut line...and MADD members would tell you they are in a “war” of sorts.
If this is what they’re doing in schools, no wonder I can’t get a correctly spelled and punctuated resume from HS grads these days.
I would sue for intentional infliction of emotional distress - and I'm not a litigious person.
MADD have put themselves on the same moral level as drunk drivers.
They did this when I was in High school, and it worked.
It was a MADD thing, it was a DARE thing. The local police and school faculty had called us into the auditorium and allowed us all to hear the news. Not just the classrooms of the attendees. No one I knew was in the act, but they were all drama students that took part in it.
Yes, it was a lie - but I also recount tales of a friend in the Marines who was told that at the end of basic training, his peers were called into an assembly and told that they were being deployed to a hostile area in Afghanistan because many US soldiers had died. It was a lie, and it was told to test and prepare them for the brevity of the situation.
In my class, we had no drinking deaths. The act was sobering, and my area also routinely crashes cars to show the damage, and flat-beds the cars to the school to show the damage. They are left on school grounds for everyone to see, complete with glass and sharp steel. I think that even outside of Drinking, all young people should see this demonstration and be reminded that no one is indestructible.
I hope tomorrow they study the three R’s
or maybe there is a session on ‘raising awareness’ for something else
I know i could have done much better if my ‘awareness’ had been raised about polar bears and spotted owls and diversity and .......
My hometown in Southern Oregon has had more than one funeral in the gym of youngsters that perished to drunk driving. In one case a young fellow had his “buddies” come to his house and get him out of bed to go riding. He was sobber but his “friends” were drunk and they were driving until they missed a curve and slammed into a tree killing him instantly.
And the libs complain when Pro lifers show accurate photographs of aborted babies and sonograms of babies in their mothers’ wombs during protests!
This stuff is nothing new.
Our high school used to have students “die”. Every 15 minutes (or what ever the time was way back when) one student would don a black T-shirt and gray make-up and was “dead”. Couldn’t speak or interact with anyone for the remainder of the day. Then they would do the reinactment at assembly later in the day. That was 20 years ago.
MADD libeled and slandered their own founder by making up a DUI story about her. Why is this a surprise?
Cruel hoax, IMHO. Those MADD Hags are beyond the pale.
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