Shock, but not awe

Board responds to inappropriate video

Shock and awe has its place.

The term has been used to describe a particular military strategy, one that attempts to weaken an opponent by an overwhelming show of firepower and battlefield tactics. The demonstration isn’t meant just to diminish the opponent’s capacity to fight, but their very will to carry on the battle.

So, yeah, in the military sense, shock and awe has real-world application.

In the training of teachers, though, it’s not a technique we’d recommend.

News reports about what happened at a recent Prairie Grove training session for teachers reminded us of the military terminology, and not in a good way. Spoiler alert: After this incident, the school district’s superintendent saw her time leading the district come to a rapid end while another administrator faces time on leave for the rest of this school year.

What could have led to such a disruption in the middle of a school year? Shock, for sure. Maybe not so much awe.

At a teacher training event on the last day of November, these administrators played a role in showing a video. Middle School Principal Shayne Taylor, according to a teacher, showed a video that was styled after an “In memoriam” segment. One imagines it might have been something like the video segments shown every year at the Oscars ceremony, remembering those in the movie biz who had passed away during the preceding year.

The video said something like “On Dec. 14, 2022, a gunman entered Prairie Grove Middle School.” That was a date in the future, for those keeping track. The video, complete with somber music, detailed how many people were injured and killed in this pretend shooting, then it started showing the images

of those who had died.

Sounds awful. It gets worse. The images were pictures of some of the teachers’ own children.

Undoubtedly, that got everyone’s attention. We don’t know precisely what the point of the training was, but if the folks who created the video wanted a gut-punch response, it’s hard to imagine a more dramatic way to do it. Or hurtful.

Let’s assume for a moment the trainers were intent on impressing upon the educators the importance of school security. What would the question implicit in the video have been — do your jobs well or your kid might die?

It seems everyone has already seen too many real-life scenarios in which a gunman enters a school and commits violence against students and educators alike. Do teachers need some kind of dramatic double-dose reminder? Doubt it.

So now the School Board has met in executive session, with a capacity crowd of teachers and their supporters urging the board to stand up for teachers.

School Board President William Dick denied the board was acting as a result of the video. Instead, the board was simply asked to consider three personnel actions: allowing Superintendent Reba Holmes to take a leave of absence, with pay for vacation and sick days, that will cover her until she retires on June 30; allowing Taylor to take personal vacation and sick time as part of his leave of absence through June 30; and to name an interim superintendent, Pete Joenks.

It’s unfathomable, really, that any professional educator would consider a video like this a good idea. While educators these days must acknowledge the dangers associated with their jobs and the roles they play in protecting the community’s children, must they face such vividly raw imagery to get that point across? Not at all.