Edu-Terrorism

A question for parents: how would you feel if your child's teacher terrorized your child?

Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.

The mock attack Thursday night was intended as a learning experience and lasted five minutes during the weeklong trip to a state park, said Scales Elementary School Assistant Principal Don Bartch, who led the trip.

"We got together and discussed what we would have done in a real situation," he said.

But parents of the sixth-grade students were outraged.

"The children were in that room in the dark, begging for their lives, because they thought there was someone with a gun after them," said Brandy Cole, whose son went on the trip.

The children in this incident emerged physically unscathed, but that outcome was not guaranteed. The students could have just as easily panicked and attempted to escape, at which point the 69 student could have trampled one another, causing serious injuries.

The school principal, Catherine Stephens, in a hidious understatement, said that the staff members involved exhibited "poor judgment." The school Web site says the teachers involved considered the act of edu-terrorism a "prank."

Poor judgement? A prank? A teacher berating a child in front of their class for getting an answer wrong exhibits poor judgment. A camp prank is "short-sheeting" a bed.

The staff and teachers of Scales Elementary School premeditated and carried out a plot in which almost six dozen children were purposefully convinced they might die. In any other situation, such a threat, serious or not, would and should be viewed as a criminal act.

A real example of poor judgment in this instance would be the continued employment of these sadists as teachers. I hope that Murfreesboro City Schools has better judgement than that.