This staff member won’t be winning any “Employee of the Month” awards any time soon. Details inside.
Parents at a North Carolina school are LIVID (and rightfully so) after a staff member came to classes dressed up as a bank robber.
Apparently, this person thought it was an appropriate way to teach the children on how to be more aware of their surroundings. As part of this “lesson” the employee at Eastern Wayne Middle School wore a ski mask and carried a toy gun that he pointed around at SIXTH graders.
Not surprisingly, many students were upset and the principal sent out a letter to parents which in part read:
“As part of an enrichment lesson on exhibiting good citizenship … another staff member entered the sixth grade classrooms and pretended to steal and item while dressed in a ski-mask and holding a toy pistol. Even though play-acting caused some initial concerns, once the skit was completed, the teachers quickly explained who the person was and that the ‘theft’ was not real. Students were then asked to discuss what they observed”.
District Public Information Officer Ken Derksen admitted that this lessons could have been handled more carefully, especially in light of recent school shootings in the United States, “The exercise in its original intent was appropriate, but in how it was executed it obviously lacked judgment,”
Many referred to the incident as “galactically stupid” and “insane” although surprisingly the uncle of one of the students didn’t think so,
Joe Collins, the uncle of a student at Eastern Wayne Middle School said, “In my opinion, I think the realistic events — of course I have a military background — so the more realistic you can make it, the better it seems,”,
This isn’t the first time that something like this has occurred. Last December a New York City public school principal staged a school shooting as part of a drill without informing students or teachers. One of the teachers involved in that incident described it as “probably the worst feeling I ever had in my life”.
Thoughts?