drinking and driving - how far is too far when it comes to prevention?

I heard about this story on the radio last week. School administrators at a high school in the San Diego area decided that in order to get the point across to students about the real effects of drunk driving, they would have highway patrol officers show up at the school and announce to the students that a number of their fellow classmates had been killed in car accidents over the weekend. Students were understandably devasted to hear the news, but the grief turned into anger when they eventually found out that it was simply a hoax to teach them a lesson about the dangers and consequences of drinking and driving.

Administrators are defending their actions by saying that they wanted the students to be shocked, that they wanted the students to know what it felt like, that it was a sort of "Scared Straight" tactic.

Their plan was a take-off of a program called Every 15 Minutes, which is designed to illustrate the devastating and fatal effects of drinking and driving. But that program is conducted quite differently.

There's a part of me that understands that just telling kids not to drink and drive isn't really going to work. The kids probably need more concrete examples than that. And I might not have objected to this particular tactic except for one thing - none of the kids' parents was told that this was going to happen, so none of them had the ability to consent to, or veto, this particular way of teaching the lesson.

If I had kids, I don't think I would be too happy if my child came home and told me that this had happened to them that day. Obviously, we're not talking about little kids here - we're talking about high school students. But as such, most of them are still minors, and as I recall, when I was in junior high school and high school, parental permission was still required for a lot of things, even including sex education. Outside of the normal curriculum, parents had a right to say what their kids could be exposed to by the school. Does that mean that kids won't learn anything their parents don't want them to? Of course not, because obviously, kids learn a lot, if not more, from friends and other means than they do through the school when it comes to non-academic subjects. But if the system is put in place where the parents *do* need to give their permission for certain things, I would think that something like purposely traumatizing their child would be one of those. I don't think I would have approved of this hoax being perpetrated on my own child - I personally think there are better ways of getting the point across. But if someone else thought this would work on their own child, that's for them to make the decision.

Obviously, some kids participated in the hoax - not just the kids that supposedly died but also some family members and friends as well. I can excuse their behaviour because they're young and don't know any better. But I cannot and do not excuse the behaviour of the administrators and the highway patrol officers. They are adults, and while they may have had the kids' eventual welfare as their main concern, I think they seriously missed the mark on how to achieve that.

There has been a comparison made between this action and the "Scared Straight" approach. The main difference? "Scared Straight" was a program only for kids who were already in trouble, who already had a history that pointed to them getting in more and more trouble, and whose participation in the program was agreed to by their parents. None of those criteria was in play here. This hoax wasn't enacted on just those students who showed a high risk or had actually participated in drinking and driving. This hoax was perpetrated on all the students, and again, without any parental consent. The argument could be made that even those who don't currently or haven't had a drink and then driven could have the potential to do so in the future, or they might at least be present when someone else is doing it, so they could be a voice of reason for those people, but I just don't think the means justify the ends in this case.

Some of the kids have expressed that they feel betrayed, and it makes me think that the program may actually backfire. I could see this turned into one big joke, and it could completely detract from the actual reality of what drinking and driving can cause. Hey, people didn't really die last time, they're not going to this time either. I'm not sure that a lie, especially of this magnitude, was the best way to go about spreading the message. There have been many other ways that the very real tragedies of drinking and driving have been passed along, where actual people in actual accidents have made the rounds telling their stories, whether it's a victim who might be in a wheelchair; or the person who was drinking and driving who might also be in a wheelchair but who at the very least has to face living the rest of their life knowing they caused the death of someone, perhaps even a relative or friend, because of their behaviour; or whether it's a survivor who tells about losing a family member or friend.

I understand that the goal was to save lives and heartaches, and there are many ways to try to do that, but I just can't see that what they did was one of the right ways to go about it.