for me in the late 90s, pre Columbine so no shooter drills, the state police bright in a presentation with a bunch of dui wrecks and deaths. then they followed it up with a wrecked car outside with helicopter ems arriving. obviously it made an impression since i still remember it. i still remember the smell of blood from driving past the fatal accident that actually killed a classmate too though.
My American high school did this in preparation for promotion 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.
I don’t really remember this, but I remember them showing us literal crash photos and whatnot
My school had a wreck towed on campus to look at, but no skit. No, that was too tame. They held periods during which they had a speaker come and show us gorey slides of the results of car wrecks. You could opt out of it of course, but most attended and traumatized ourselves. It sounds fake, and now I’m wondering if I am relaying a false memory about it or not. Did this happen to anybody else?
We definitely had the wrecked car before prom at my high school. Not the slide show though. I think one year we did have to attend a presentation where a parent who lost their kid in an accident gave a talk, which is also a little fucked up.
We had something similar, but there was a helicopter instead of an ambulance
“Operation Prom Night”. We lost several that day.
That “… or no” at the end got me good.
As an (insert counrty you like to shit on here) person, I only remember violent gunman drills specifically. We would all be instructed to hide in a corner(s) not visible from the hallway, and to stay dead silent, while the administration staff knocked on the doors and didn’t do the “all OK” actions.
Funnily enough, my suggestion we “grab a knife or knifey object and we’ll bum rush the fucker” NEVER went over well, for some reason.
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.
Born and raised in Alberta, I’ve never heard of or seen this
Then you are lucky. I was in Fort McMurray and got dragged across the river to another school to go watch this nonsense.
wait this genuinely isn’t a shitpost?
Not a shitpost. I remember this happening quite vividly. We sat in an auditorium and watched some giant video about the dangers of drinking and driving. They talked about texting and driving because cell phones amongst teens were starting to become a thing but no video was made yet. After watching it they talked about an exercise that we would do and asked for participants. I put my hand up out of boredom but wasn’t chosen. We went outside where there was at least one firetruck, an ambulance and a couple of cop cars. A police line was set up and beyond it were the people who had been picked that were either lying on the floor motionless or acting injured. Some more camp than others. They then took some more participants and had them be ‘first responders’ to help the injured until professional help could come. After we finished we went back in the auditorium and talked about what happened. I know there was a gong involved somewhere because someone hit it and half of the class laughed almost immediately and the teachers snapped to say it was more serious and solemn. Can’t really remember anything after that but my guess is that from there on it was just generic field trip shit with us shuttling back to our main school.
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.
Sounds like it may have been Gene Parmesan
In my school, one student was pronounced dead at the scene, one was taken by ambulance, and another was airlifted.
Every day, we would hear a car crash and heartbeat come up on the announcement system and then a grim reaper would walk into a classroom and tap a student on the should who “died” from drunk driving. They were taken to another room, where they put on makeup and a tombstone was placed for them in front of the school. At the end of the day, all the “dead” students would stand behind their tombstone. The “dead” would still attend class, but say nothing.
At the end of the week, there was a big presentation, where some people who survived a drunk driving accident spoke about their experience and statistics. He had suffered third-degree burns across his body and took off his shirt and walked around the auditorium, so that we could see the aftermath.
Fatal Choices was intense
We got to wear some glasses that supposedly gave you drunken/on drugs vision. Everybody liked that.
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. 😂
