Just after the morning Pledge of Allegiance last Wednesday, students at Brodhead High School received a startling announcement.
Four of their classmates had been killed in a car crash involving texting and driving.
In Sam Bolen’s algebra class, people began stirring.
Brodhead is a city in rural Wisconsin, about 100 miles southwest of Milwaukee. With a population of about 3,000, it is the kind of place where everyone knows everybody else.
“They went into detail about how one of them was rushed to the hospital,” Bolen, a junior, told the Washington Post. “I was pretty upset. It is a really small school, like, most of the people really knew who they were. You kind of know who everybody is in a smaller school.”
Bolen texted his mother, and many other students did the same with their parents, he said.
“A lot of our fellow friends and students actually started crying,” Brodhead student Madison Trombley told NBC 15 News, which first reported the incident.
The person making the announcement waited 10 minutes, then said that the previous message had actually been part of a drill about safe-driving techniques.
There had not been a car crash.
The four students were not dead after all.
According to NBC 15, the “deceased” students who participated in the drill were told not to use their phones to reply to classmates.
What some classmates found bizarre was that the fake death announcements continued through the day. In the second hour, it was the school principal who came on to tell the student body that four other classmates had “died.”Wisconsin students told classmates died in crash, but it was a ‘drill’ | Twincities.com
I guess schools are now committed to running drills to simulate fake or staged events on their own students?
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