This strikes me as bordering on pavlovian cruelty: reckless, perverse, and likely ineffective. You've given extreme short-term emotional trauma to hundreds of kids, apparently without any sort of scientific study to understand firstly the effectiveness at actually changing behavior, and secondly, the long-term psychological effects of such trauma.
When there's a tragedy at a school, especially a loss of life to several students, the school-board doesn't rush in a troupe of hotcops and J. Walter Weatherman to tell them that this is why you don't drink and drive, you don't play with firearms, etc. Instead, they bring in counsellors. They don't treat it as a chance to change behavior until much later, when they can pay close attention to how students are coping. The emotional damage in these first hours after a tragedy can last for a lifetime, and is not to be taken trivially. And here they are dispensing that trauma like a cheap new medical drug, like they found a way to take those kids huddled together outside Columbine and bottle that reaction, and dismiss any notions of side effects by saying 'oh, well it wasn't real.'
If I was a parent and they did this to my kid, I can't even imagine what I'd do. Well actually I can. My first concern would be to talk to my child, and if there's even the slightest sign that they're internalizing it or having trouble coping, I'm taking them to a councellor who has experience with trauma in youths, and then recommending to other parents that they do the same. And then after that, I would go after the school and the police so hard. People need to lose jobs over this.
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