Officials use ruse at high school to clear halls for drug search

[Video Link] Police and school administrators Wolcott High School in Connecticut tricked students and teachers into believing a dangerous intruder had come into the school building and ordered a lockdown. It was a ruse for a drug sweep of the lockers. No drugs were found. In the video, the police and Wolcott school superintendent Joseph Macary serve a large pile of steaming horseshit to defend their reckless stunt. As kehfysik says in the comments: "The teaching point here is that they can not trust the people into whose care they are given. The authorities will lie to you and try to use fear to control you. I hope the kids learn this."

At Wolcott High School one morning this week, an urgent announcement crackled over the intercom: a threatening intruder was in the building and students were told to immediately take refuge in classrooms.
Doors were locked and police, with dogs, moved in. Students stayed huddled in classrooms where they were told to stay away from the windows.
But what sounded like a frightening situation was just a search for narcotics. Drug-sniffing dogs combed the school while students stayed in locked classrooms, believing that an attacker was roaming the halls.

Officials Use Ruse At Wolcott High To Clear Halls For Drug Search (Via The Agitator)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Manny

From the linked article: “If you say something important to teenagers and you want them to trust you, it’s better not to lie.”
http://twitter.com/pdxhayes pdxhayes

Apparently, the school administrators never heard the fable about the “Little boy who cried Wolf”.
- Trent Hawkins
  
  that boy was on drugs.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Apparently, the school administrators never heard the fable about the “Little boy who cried Wolf”.
  
  Or the Little Boy Who Booby-trapped His Locker With Explosives.
  - Felton / Moderator
    
    Or dog biscuits.
GTBurns48215

Cant do this shit during the fire drills? need to make up some crazy instead.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_KEEYVOKLLBZUMX3PLWZ735JM4E yahoo-KEEYVOKLLBZUMX3PLWZ735JM4E

I don’t appreciate your ruse, sir.
Trey Roady

… and there is still confusion as to why some view public schools as little jails now? After all, it’s important to completely shut down all operation of a school to check students for drugs. I see where priorities are.
bo1n6bo1n6

“Tell the children the truth.”-Bob Marley
bruckelsprout

So did anyone start texting or calling their parents or spouses about this while it was happening? I mean, this had the potential to ruin a lot more than 4th period.
Hanglyman

“Young people will learn not to trust the police. It’s a terrible civics lesson.”

Sounds like a good lesson to me. After all, the police were in on it, weren’t they? Not to mention the thousands of other incidents across the country that show police are not to be trusted.
- http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios
  
  Hopefully the kids will be smart enough to take that very lesson from this. The police are NOT your friends. Never have been, never will be.
Chuck

The kids will never fall for that trick again. Next time, you’ll have to escalate to having one of the students “snapping” and running through the school firing a gun with blanks in it. (Maybe some volunteer victims with fake blood packets as well.) The drug dogs will follow in his wake.
https://twitter.com/misterjayem MrJM

In other news, Wolcott Superintendent, Joseph Macary defended his title at this year’s George Costanza Look-A-Like Contest.
hassenpfeffer

Next kid who phones any school with a bomb threat can now say it was so the cops could check for drugs.
exile

Is this not an act of terrorism?
A warrant-less search without probable cause?
- http://imcravingpresidency.tumblr.com/ SedanChair
  
  Didn’t you hear? They don’t need a warrant, the warrant is coming out of their balls.
- James Howat
  
  No, school owns the lockers….
  - exile
    
    That’s a bit of a non sequitur!
    
    Another thing the school owns is a duty of care for the children studying there. Terrorizing them into thinking that they are soon to die is, I think, a severe dereliction of that duty. And pretty fucking sadistic IMHO.
MrMarieBlanc

Some people think they are above the “laws” of morality and human decency. Now they will never know why those kids felt like taking drugs (just for fun, experimentation, or self medication,etc.). They have lost all trust and thus the ability to communicate.

Also, was this inspired by a recent South Park episode…? They should have had a pizza party instead!
- 84jkdl202
  
  The cops and the superintendent deserve some cupcakes, as a reward for their heroic effort in the War on Drugs.
kehfysik

The teaching point here is that they can not trust the people into whose care they are given. The authorities will lie to you and try to use fear to control you. I hope the kids learn this.

Edited to add: Superintendent of Schools Joseph McCary said. “We are providing a safe and secure nurturing environment.” I wonder what he thinks he is nurturing?
- jerwin
  
  I wonder what he thinks he is nurturing?
  
  The revolutionary spirit, of course.
xzzy

I say we discipline school staff the same way they discipline kids: zero tolerance.

If a kid were to start shouting there was a gunman at school when no such thing was going on, they’d get expelled about as fast as you can blink. Even doodling a gun on your notebook is enough to get in trouble these days.

With that in mind, I think it’s fair to fire anyone involved with this stunt.
- 84jkdl202
  
  Expelled? Try jailed.
Tom Rodenberg

They did this at my high school over 10 years ago. They would come in with bolt cutters and cut off your padlock and put a new lock on with a message attached if the dog sniffed anything suspicious. Then they would open your locker afterwards while you stood and watched. The majority of the students didn’t even know what was going on. Kids would bring their drugs with them during fire alarms so they had to catch them off guard.
- anaximander
  
  My high school used to do the sweeps during the fire drill – they’d haul the suspected kids down to the main office with no warning, then do the fire drill and run the dogs up through the back door. I only knew because I happened to be in a meeting with the principal over the yearbook when the fire guys and the drug dogs came in.
- Douglas Stuart
  
  The lockers are searchable, your person is not. The lesson being to carry your drugs ON you, at least in school.
ChicagoD

It was totally honest. There were threatening people in the halls. It’s just that it was the idiots administering the school . . .
http://www.eff.org/ deaduncledave

What about the safety of the administrators? Won’t anyone think about the terrible stress they’re under, trying to stay one step ahead of their student’s terror-stricken helicopter parents?

WHY DO YOU HATE FREEDOM? WE’RE TRYING TO KEEP YOU SAFE!
galois

My high school did something similar to this, except the idea was that we were to “practice” our “Code Red” safety drill by hiding in the classroom with the lights off. Then the cops and drug sniffing dogs would make their way through the halls. I guess the important difference is that no actual emergency was ever alleged by the school administrators.

As far as searches and seizures go, a friend of mine was expelled for having COUGH MEDICINE in her OWN CAR. Even though it was in her own car, was not actually brought into school, and somebody had to rifle through her private property to find it, still constituted a “Zero Tolerance” violation of some kind. Shit like this goes on all the time, and leaves high schoolers to believe that they actually have no rights of any kind.
Felton / Moderator

Hell of an example to set for all these kids, that lying is a perfectly acceptable way of getting what you want, even when there are clear alternatives, and that fear is an excellent motivator.
crmk

Joseph Macary is already a shining example to the student community:
http://www.wtnh.com/dpp/news/new_haven_cty/wolcott-school-superintendent-denies-plagiarism
- Felton / Moderator
  
  What a guy.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    Makes you cry.
- Mark_Frauenfelder
  
  Thanks for this. I added it to the post.
voiceinthedistance

Fire!

Fire!

Fire!

Um . . . nevermind.
- miasm
  
  [after Finlander orders an anti-submarine rocket armed]
  Commodore Schrepke: This is insane!
  Captain Finlander: Now don’t worry, Commodore. The Bedford’ll never fire first. But if he fires one, I’ll fire one.
  Ensign Ralston: [launching the rocket] Fire One!
Kendle Moon

When I was a sophomore in 2002 our high school went into lockdown for reasons that were never given, and while we were trapped in the classrooms with the lights off and told not to talk, we saw police with dogs walking through the hallway slowly. I don’t believe any drugs were found.
http://mynonurbanlife.myopenid.com/ CJ

Yeah, I’m not big on considering everything to be a firing offense, but there is no reason that every administrator involved in this should not be fired, and fired hard. A shame they can’t be made personally liable for the civil lawsuits that will, justifiably, be filed by anguished parents who thought their kids were in danger from something other than dunderheaded administrators.
David Llopis

At least now—thanks to nationwide coverage—everyone knows my podunk hometown is pronounced wool-kit rather than wall-cot.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_O73GS2LP4ARSDL3DDRC4OZXMQI Keith

They did this at my high school in the 80′s… but it was “bomb threats” back then.
GTMoogle

My highschool (1996-2000) had pretty frequent lockdowns and drug busts.

They took the drug dogs through the classrooms, and used metal scanners on the kids. So keep your drugs on you, and leave your knives and guns in your trapper keeper*.

Except that would be silly, because usually what happened was the students already knew in advance when the drug busts would be happening.

I could probably also mention that the last two years I was there, the principal was an ex-prison warden.

*: I had to do this once when I forgot I had a swiss army knife with a 1 inch blade in my pocket. ”You could have just given it to the teacher and said it was an accident” Actually, a kid who worked in a warehouse forgot he had a box cutter from work in his pocket, told the teacher, handed it over. Expelled.
edi

As many people are saying here, I went to high school over 10 years ago and this happened all the time. It was a poor, inner-city school that definitely had a drug & weapons “problem” and it was pretty much the only way to really catch contraband. I don’t know about this school, but mine was a fairly dangerous place and this was pretty necessary.
Also, I must say this is a PUBLIC SCHOOL. I’m confident that if you looked in their student handbook it would state that lockers, hallways, bathrooms, etc. ARE NOT the property of students and can be searched/looked through/etc. whenever, for whatever reason.
- David Llopis
  
  It’s a sleepy commuter town, with what was a fine public education system, at least when I was a kid.
  - Guest
    
    apparently it has an infestation of WOLF!!! WOLF!!! WOLF!!!!!
- Walter Dexter
  
  As I recall (from doing a report on it in high school 30-ish years ago) it’s fairly well established law that no warrant is needed to search school lockers. Some combination of “in loco parentis” and the lockers being school property, which the students are merely being allowed to use.
  
  This level of crazy never happened at my school in my day (class of ’86.) I think the dean probably occasionally searched a locker, but a lot of guy carried a pocket knife, and I remember the general concept floating around during hunting season that “if you have your gun in your truck, don’t park on school property.”
sidney_carton

Check this out.. Guy’s an Ass of Monumental Proportions with previous form to his Ass-Clowning…
http://www.rep-am.com/articles/2011/06/28/news/connecticut/567419.txt
IamInnocent

How can it be that children have so few rights ? Aren’t they persons ?
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  How can it be that children have so few rights ? Aren’t they persons ?
  
  Sometimes they’re viewed as persons; frequently they’re viewed as chattel property.
  - Manny
    
    There’s that whole loco parentis thing, which means they can do all sorts of things to the kids that even most loco parents would not.
- Tim
  
  Schools are often considered extra-constitutional areas, like airports. Students do not always have 4th amendment protections. It’s apparently really inconvenient to have to do the usual due process before you attempt to prosecute a minor. Because…you know…they’re tough they are to track down and investigate.
ffabian

I no longer wonder why the US Government looks like a self-righteous jerk in foreign politics when school (!) officials in their own country behave like this.
http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/OKEONAMLFIOS5WI7MPQY6SXBCQ IRMO

“My highschool (1996-2000) had pretty frequent lockdowns and drug busts.”

Mine had an actual, bona fide, holy-shit-a-kid-got-shot gang problem.

Know how it was solved?

ID tags on lanyards.
You got issued one. You had to wear it on campus. If you were a student and got caught without one, you got detention. If you weren’t a student and got caught without one, you got an arrest for tresspassing.

No lockdowns. No drug searches. It worked.

Fucking suburbanite mediocrities make me want to puke.
http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/OKEONAMLFIOS5WI7MPQY6SXBCQ IRMO

Wolcott students, if you’re reading this, (which you might, since teenagers like this site), next time you’re at an assembly, and the principal comes up to the podium, get up, turn 180 degrees, and silently keep your back to him. No chants, no disruptions, just a quiet dignified message to give him.
TokenCapitalist

And people wonder why I avoid government schools like the plague they are.
http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

Drug test that superintendent immediately. And take him in for a three-day psychiatric lockdown. He seems to be a clear danger to himself and others.

Don’t forget the cavity searches.

Edited principal to super.
- bytefyre
  
  I’d say it would’ve been fine to write principal anyways since presumably the principal would have to aggree to the lying and the dogs
Thad Boyd

“No drugs were found.”

Irrelevant.

I mean, yes, it makes this ruse look all the more absurd, but the presence or absence of drugs has nothing to do with the acceptability of such behavior.

They could have found a big bag of coke in every locker and it STILL would have been unacceptable to search for it under such a pretense.
hungryjoe

Wouldn’t it also work to wait until a class period starts, then broadcast on the intercom that all students and staff are to remain in their classrooms until further notice?

Is it really necessary to fake a crisis just to clear the halls? For F sake.

Assuming that a drug sweep is somehow worth the time and effort. If 40% of kids are engaged in some kind of frequent drug use, and you catch 1 of them, have you accomplished anything at all? Wouldn’t your efforts be better spent on, say, educating them?

If something like this ever happens at my kids’ schools, I will run for the school board.
- Donald Petersen
  
  I will run for the school board.
  
  And I’ll wish you all the luck in the world. It appears that even those apparently low-level elections are being bought by big-money corporate tools. David Sirota over at Salon posted a nightmarish account of his wife’s campaign to join Denver’s school board, and getting clobbered by the frighteningly well-funded forces to privatize public education.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Oliver-Schmieding/100000452523362 Oliver Schmieding

what is ‘despicable’.

next, “disturbed, warped and bent 100″ for me, plz.
bardfinn

The officials will not be prosecuted for terroristic threats. If there were justice, the fat, white, overpaid school superintendent, as well as the principal, would be on their way to Gitmo.

But it’s not terrorism if fat white US citizens do it “for the children”.
- http://twitter.com/brettspiel Brett Myers
  
  What do his race and body weight have to do with the issue?
raikou

I went to high school in Massachusetts. The administration told us and our parents that if there was suspicion of a student carrying a weapon or drugs, that their locker would be searched. I thought this was fair. If a student was being physically troublesome (out of control, fighting or coming to school when they were suspended) the cops were called in to do stuff, but this rarely happened. I am unsure how leagal the locker searches were but as far as I know, they were also a rare occurrence. I think it was mostly a fear tactic to keep kids in line. I sort of don’t mind this type of idle threat, as it serves the community at large.

These people lied to their students and caused them undue stress. This may just be my bent because I was a psych student in college, but there are plenty of kids with anxiety disorders who really don’t need that kind of shit. Even without any psychological conditions, there must have been students having panic attacks.

TL;DR: It is super not okay to cause innocent people undue stress. I think they school board should have just told the kids there were doing a drug search (as long as it is withing their legal bounds). That way, the only people who would have freaked out would have been the kids who had drugs or weapons in their lockers.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  I went to high school in Massachusetts.
  
  I went to high school in Massachusetts in the early 70s. We never had drug searches. And believe me, there were a lot of lockers full of drugs in those days.
  - Blaze Curry
    
    and yet somehow, many more of those kids got an education than the numbers we’re seeing today…correlation between drugs/freedom and graduates?
    - Guest
      
      Yeah, let’s blame drugs for past success, rather than historic vocational education. [facepalm]
Robin Bowles

My public high school in southeast PA in the late 1990s used scheduled Fire Drills as an excuse to take the local cops’ drug sniffing dog through our lockers. It led to people running to their lockers when the fire alarm went off to remove contraban when we actually did have a real fire alarm. It was widely rumored (at the time) that it was a tactic colleges dorms used.
Guest

I think they fine citizens of Wolcott should vote to turn off the hot water at the police barracks, until this is resolved. That’s logical, right? Who needs hot water during an investigation of a serious abuse of power.
Bucket

Back in my day, Johnny Depp just showed up in your English class one day with no explanation and started talking in this really bizarre attempt at teenage slang. “Yo, home-skillet, word on the street is that you’re down with the c-powder! Slap me a double-dime of that fine stuff, my like-aged peer!”

Then, a few days later, the stoner heavy metal dude that sat next to you would be gone, never to be seen again.

Then later on in the semester Johnny Depp would show up in your chemistry class and the process would repeat itself.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Then, a few days later, the stoner heavy metal dude that sat next to you would be gone, never to be seen again.
  
  He’s probably just somewhere hangin’ on the flippety-flop.
Mike Hathaway

It was a cheap stunt and a miss use of the drill principal should be gone. If you want to sweep the halls with drug dogs. Anounce it and do it, its perfectly legal for school to sweep for narcotics. Perhaps have a cop go into a couple classrooms with some of there training packs that smell like drugs and have the kids hide it for the dogs to find… You know have the police build a positive relationship with students.

The police chief and principal are morons, choosing to be dishonest thugs instead of building positive relationships.
Guest

We all know they did it in the 70′s and 80′s.

But 9/11 changed everything. RIGHT?
simonbarsinister

> How can it be that children have so few rights ? Aren’t they persons ?

Only if they incorporate.
- jerwin
  
  Between 1969 (Tinker v Des Moines), and 1988 (Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier), students had plenty of rights. Afterwards, not so much.
simonbarsinister

BTW this is part of why I home-school my kids.
- Rebecca DeLaTorre
  
  Me, too. And I am a former high school teacher. I just couldn’t stomach the idea of my own kids being subjected to crap like this.
  
  In my school, the drug dogs always visited the English as a second language and technical classes and never got around to the Honors and AP classes. This is, as we all know, because intelligent kids NEVER experiment with drugs.
  - http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher
    
    In my high school as long as you weren’t black and didn’t have long hair you could roam the halls freely during classes. If a principal patrolling the halls found you all you had to say was, “I’m in the band.” That’s the level of power the school’s marching band had. Not that band members misused this power (a few did, but most didn’t), but no one in the band ever got more than a slap on the wrist for any infraction. Kids with long hair and minorities, on the other hand, could be subject to harassment and searches at any time.
    
    Slightly unrelated, I had a history teacher who had a wonderful way of responding whenever a student complained of a headache. She’d say, “I can’t give you any of the aspirin I’VE GOT IN THE TOP RIGHT HAND DRAWER OF MY DESK. I have to go to the office for a moment and I want you all to behave, and don’t get up or look IN THE TOP RIGHT HAND DRAWER OF MY DESK where I keep my aspirin that I use for HEADACHES.”
    
    I still remember a lot of what she taught me about history, but I find she taught me some very important practical lessons as well.
ridestowe

again, an idea a coke head would come up with
Thomas Shaddack

A bit of bong water, applied into each locker, could raise the “background noise” for the dogs significantly.
- narddogz
  
  Yes! This is what happened at my high school in the 80s. The school stoners were heroes for a week afterward, elevated in status even above the jocks.
  
  We also would smear a thin coating of Vicks VapoRub on the inside locker doors. Suddenly it seemed everyone had developed a bad cold….
- gadgetphile
  
  Shouldn’t something more potent be placed in the school office?
miasm

…in recent news, School Administrations have announced their intention to institute a new policy of bad-behaviour scanning. The new scanners will replace the metal detectors at all entrances and operate by firing a cherry-pink, feedback laser into the forehead of the students.
VibroCount

I believe now it has become the era of please coat your locker (inside and out) with vast quantities of cayenne pepper, and recrush it frequently. Let’s give these dogs something marvelous to inhale. Oh, and the canines, too.
GoGo Vicmorrow

They did this several times at my high school when I attended (grad 04). I would guess they still use these tactics. They incident I recall and was in attendance for was similar to the one in this story. They called for a lock down drill (for school shooters etc) and requested we all go to the gym, but strangely enough they wanted us to bring our backpacks. So as we are entering the school lobby and filing in the gym they are having us pile are bags up against the wall and we can see cops with k-9 units outside. I do remember a lot of smug students that had their stuff on hand (as most everyone would I assume. Watch pocket right? Who risks losing their drugs swinging around in a back pack freely?) I see it now, but I really never thought it was that fucked up at the time.. it was war on students it seemed.
GoGo Vicmorrow

Also.. there are always drugs in school and kids are way ahead of the admins. All a drug sweep means is a few kids get a lot higher, a lot sooner than they initially intended to be.
Moriarty

I don’t get it. Issues of authoritarian drug searches aside, what is even the purpose of a ruse? Why not just tell everybody the truth, that they can’t leave the classroom while the police search for drugs? What am I missing here?
hpfan41

I go to a private christian high school, and searches like these are commonplace. Practically every month. Along with lockers, cars and backpacks are searched as well. The dog comes into the classroom and we are made to stand outside while it searches our backpacks. People are found with drugs frequently so the dogs work, but there is little regard for personal privacy. The school’s policies are chock full of things that seem unconstitutional, or leave no right to privacy. I’m glad I’m graduating.
bytefyre

I would say that searching backpacks every month consitutes harrassment. I think a good object lesson for the police and the administration would be if the students in a classroom all refused to have their bags searched, or staged a walkout. I can understand though that the students already feel pretty intimidated by it otherwise they wouldn’t let it happen every month and allow their vehicles to be searched so often.
http://imcravingpresidency.tumblr.com/ SedanChair

It’s good that people are outraged about this, but it’s depressing that this event (where no one was arrested) causes more indignation than the thousands of warrantless stop-and-frisk searches done on “urban youths” every day.
- jeligula
  
  Do you honestly think that is the case, SedanChair? The Supreme Court ruled that cops no longer need search warrants in any situation anyway. As long as they say that they suspected that evidence of a crime was being destroyed, they don’t need to get a search warrant in order to kick down a door and any evidence gathered in such a case is admissible in court. Regardless of the fact that criminal law states that all evidence must have an auditable chain of custody which usually starts with a search warrant issued by a judge. If this chain of evidence is not followed to the letter, it means that someone could have introduced any factor in to the evidence or removed something for whatever reason and that would necessarily rule out the validity of the evidence. This is the way freedom dies: not with a whimper, but with thunderous applause. The Supreme Court is actively working against the people and for corporations and law enforcement. They don’t give a rotten fig for our rights or rendering decisions that uphold those rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution. Ruling in favor of the Constitution is ruling against the corporations that feed them more money in a week than they make in 5 years of sitting the Supreme bench. Corruption and cluelessness starts at the very top, and there isn’t a more corrupt branch of government than the Supreme Court.
Garnett Schuyler

Yeah, they do this at my high school. The main difference is that it’s clearly identified as a drill during, and most folks don’t even bother going beyond locking the door.
http://profiles.google.com/creesto Creesto4 Lynch

Seems to me that turnabout might be fair play, say, if someone were to schmear incriminatingly smelly things on the tires, carpet, etc. of certain administrative officials, with perhaps an errant seed or two of some kind or another placed in inconspicuous spots, especially if said official was headed some where on spring break, perhaps some place that requires a passport… just saying.

Kids: they’re not idiots. And yet adults insist on treating them as such. Every. Time.
http://jimbeach.net mindfu

The problem is less with the searching, than with the lying and making kids and teachers think they might be freaking shot by a gunman.

A surprise fire drill would work better. Or, just announcing “We are locking down the classrooms to search for drugs.” But that would be, you know, actually treating children and their teachers like human beings rather than livestock.

This is yet another argument for the Khan academy, really. Except parents also need schools as day care so they can work our 2 jobs with no health care.
jeligula

Manipulative scumbags, plain and simple. What is so unbelievable here is that they did not need an excuse to search the lockers, yet they decided to create fear and panic in order to do so. And I have a hard time believing they found nothing at all. That would seem to be statistically impossible. Either that, or kids are smart enough to know that they are not safe storing contraband items in their lockers. Either way, these “educators” should lose their jobs.
http://profiles.google.com/tentodttatcs Scott Reinard

To be fair, the superintendent used to be the principal on “Beavis and Butthead”.
http://twitter.com/greymalkini James

I’m no lawyer, but this sounds like a possible lawsuit for intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Richard Dagenais

What amazes me is that most of the commenters seem to find it completely reasonable that the school is bringing the police in to search the students’ lockers.
Sean Breakey

First off, no, kids are not persons, (legally), they are minors, under the protection of a parent(s) or guardian(s). Schools are considered to be acting in lieu of the parents, and so locker searches can legally be performed whenever they feel like it.

This said, whether or not schools SHOULD be doing this is a completely different story. There are two key issues here, 1) that they basically scarred the kids for life, and 2) didn’t find any drugs. There are enough people railing against the first one, so I’ll focus on the second one.

They didn’t find anything. This either means that there was absolutely no need to do this, or that this particular method won’t work. If there is no drug problem at the school, then this is not justifed in the slightest. If there is a drug problem, then this obviously doesn’t work; have the kids, with their packs / books waiting in front of their lockers. Tell them exactly what you are doing, and reinforce that the problem is so bad that THIS IS NECESSARY. Reinforce that if certain little *expletive deleted*’s stopped bringing drugs to school, these would stop. Reinforce that every single person who has the idiocy to buy or sell drugs on school grounds is furthering the problem, and that mandatory locker checks would STOP once they were eliminated.
84jkdl202

There in fact were dangerous men with guns in the halls of that school. They were also armed with Tasers, handcuffs, batons, and pepper spray.
Theresa N

I prefer what my 12th grade politics teacher did… when she “thought she saw marijuana” in a student’s bag, she searched the bag, found it, called in security…it was a whole scene. Except it was staged. It wasn’t really weed, and the student and security guard were both in on it. She did this as a demonstration of an illegal search. She wanted to see how we would react and to make sure we knew that kind of thing wasn’t okay.
Nick

I wonder if someone called the principal and superintendent and said their wives and children were being held at gunpoint by a home intruder and they needed to make decisions on what to do; what would they say when they found out it was a drill?

They need to be prepared for such emergencies in case it actually did happen after all….
http://profiles.google.com/genehatemp Gene Ha

After I read your article, like Sydney_Carton I tracked down more articles about Superintendent Joseph P. Macary. It just gets worse and worse. In chronological order:

http://www.rep-am.com/articles/2010/02/28/news/local/469377.txt
Feb 2010
“The superintendent of schools has come under fire since a retired teacher wrote a letter to members of the Board of Education accusing him of having a ‘rude and dictatorial’ management style and intimidating teachers who oppose his ideas. Acting Superintendent Joseph P. Macary took helm of the school district on July 1, 2009. The Board of Education voted to appoint him acting superintendent when it realized he lacked a certificate that the state requires superintendents to hold.”

http://www.wtnh.com/dpp/news/new_haven_cty/wolcott-school-superintendent-denies-plagiarism
June 2011
Superintendent Macary gives a speech to graduating seniors. Part of is plagiarized from an essay posted on the Internet. “He said he had no malicious intent, and his goal was to inspire students.”

http://rep-am.com/articles/2011/10/12/news/local/591160.txt
September 2010
One year into his 3 year contract, the School Board unanimously renews his contract with annual automatic raises. “The Board of Education approved Macary’s 2011-14 contract at its Sept. 26 meeting with little notice other than an agenda item that said ‘approve a contract,’ but didn’t specify whose contract was being considered.” I wonder if he finally has the certification he lacked in February 2010.
Cowicide

McCary, the Wolcott superintendent, said they want to teach students to take their safety seriously, so making them think it was real was essential. “If you say it’s just a drill, would you move as quickly?”

Dear Superintendent McCary,

If I threaten to beat the living shit out of you, can that effort help you to step down as superintendent more quickly? Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you speed up that process.

With warm regards,

Taking Safety Seriously

/s
grimc

I was in high school when the courts said that school officials could search student lockers without a warrant or even the student’s knowledge. The very next day there was a fire drill, so everybody filed out onto the back patio and football field. A local TV station was next door, and had big windows that overlooked the area. Some jokers had taped a huge sign in the window that read, “THEY’RE SEARCHING YOUR LOCKERS”.

Ah, memories.
Snig

Among the students and staff who heard the message were almost certainly folks who had previously traumatized by violence. Making them revisit that place so you can play cops and robbers is just evil.

Also, this is how conspiracy theorists get started. One day you’re a happy camper going to school to learn, then you get lied to by the king of the teachers, next thing you know you’re counting the pixels in the “moon landing”.
CaptainPedge

Sounds like another argument for homeschooling to me…
- Guest
  
  To me it sounds like a good argument for house arrest.
  
  The kids are not the danger to the community.
SamSam

FYI: A lot of schools do the “dangerous intruder” lockdown drill. I was installing our educational software in a school in Alaska when all of a sudden the alarm went off and we had to turn off the lights and shut the blinds (not sure what that would have done), until they announced the “all clear.” It’s not much different from a fire drill — they don’t tell the students those are drills either, until after.

I may not buy the “let’s teach our kids to be fearful” mentality, but it’s common and not surprising in this country.

The problem wasn’t that they did the drill and may have scared some kids: the problem is that they lied about it, and did it for ulterior motives.
Improbus Liber

The sooner the kids learn that authorities can not be trusted the better.
Cocomaan

This is terrifying, and yet another reason not to have kids.
http://twitter.com/perizade Perizade

I’m a teacher and I’d be flipping my lid if this happened to me. The kids weren’t the only ones who were scared and lied to. If they had to, had to, had to do an unannounced sweep, they could have, a) said it was a drill or b) tell them to get in the classrooms and shut the hell up because they are doing a surprise drug sweep. Mystery solved.
That Evening Sun

Doors are locked, shades are drawn and the lights are turned off and students are told to move to a corner of the room.”

“After
10 minutes we say this is a drill and at that point we started a search
for drugs,” McCary said. “We are providing a safe and secure nurturing
environment.”

When I think of children huddled in the corner of a darkened room wondering if they are about to die the word “nurturing” doesn’t spring to mind. Is there a connotation of that word used in Connecticut with which I am not familiar?
- jerwin
  
  My guess is that he doesn’t stop to think what individual words mean, but rather strings together existing clichés, in the pattern suggested by George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language. After all, he did plagiarize for his commencement address.
  
  “Nurturing” always pairs off with “environment”, and “safe” always pairs off with “secure.”
http://about.me/roxanne.weber Roxanne

This is insane!!! That administration should be put in jail! How can this be ANY different than a student who posts a threat to a college or high school on facebook or twitter and is suspended, reprimanded and arrested? In today’s world such an intruder could easily have been another columbine in the minds of these children. And for WHAT? For drugs (as if THAT is the real threat our society has to be concerned about these days). Insanity!
magnetiquewolf

what a terrible man, didn’t he stop and think about his students who may have post-traumatic stress?
howaboutthisdangit

Parents should have “zero tolerance” for this, but too many of them are already obedient consumer-sheep, so their children will be, too.

If I ever have kids, I’m homeschooling.
jerwin

“Zero Tolerance” has such an exacting engineering feel to it. I’m not an engineer, so I have to rely on wikipedia.

From their article on Engineering Tolerance

Dimensions, properties, or conditions may vary within certain practical limits without significantly affecting functioning of equipment or a process. Tolerances are specified to allow reasonable leeway for imperfections and inherent variability without compromising performance.
A variation beyond the tolerance (for example, a temperature that’s too hot or too cold) is said to be non-compliant, rejected, or exceeding the tolerance (regardless of if this breach was of the lower or the upper bound). If the tolerance is set too restrictive, resulting in most objects run by it being rejected, it is said to be intolerant.

(Emphasis added)
In other words, a system designed around “zero tolerance” will not work. Gears will lock up. Parts will break.
Vadym Zakrevskyy

Oh Gosh. I sure hope no one picks up the courage to yank fire alarmsies nearby this cat’s office. Repeatedly. That just would be plane wrong. And probably would get yous in troublz. Srsly.
http://twitter.com/SamGimbel Sam Gimbel

They used to do drug sweeps at my high school under the guise of “Lockdown Drills” all the time. We’d hear a “code” over the intercom, followed by a “this is a drill” message, after which point the lights would be turned off, the windows shut/shuttered, and everyone hid under their desks quietly and out of view of the door. Then you’d hear the dogs barking in the hallway and lockers slamming open and shut. We all knew what was happening, of course.

This was in Charlottesville, VA. I think I was 14 when I realized adults would rather lie to me than have to be held accountable for their actions.