Our own "War of the Worlds"

We had a faculty meeting yesterday that was supposed to be about crisis management plans, but ended up being about something else entirely.

Our local police department, wanting to impress upon us the importance of not being killed in a school shooting (as if we needed encouragement) presented a video with little introduction. A teacher asked one of the officers what it was and he said quietly, "It's Columbine." For the next ten minutes, we saw what looked like security camera footage from the cafeteria and library of a school being attacked by two young gunmen. We saw them shoot people on and off camera, and heard them taunting victims. Eventually they shot themselves. We were all stunned, many crying. I had a hard time getting to sleep last night as some of the more vivid scenes ran in my mind. And it was the main topic of discussion at work today - what the video meant, what we could do to be safe, and the emotional trauma we had experienced in watching kids killed before our very eyes. We had another faculty meeting after school today in which the principal apologized for what happened, saying the police didn't tell her what they were going to show.

But it turns out the video wasn't from Columbine. It was from a movie, called Zero Day, about a fictional school shooting. The particular scene we saw (I don't recommend watching it) has been confused on several sites as real Columbine footage, and although there were a few things that seemed off about the clip we saw (wrong date on the camera, clearer audio than you would expect, etc.) we trusted that the police weren't lying to us. Word is just now getting around the school that what we saw (which gave some of us nightmares) was not what we thought it was, and I expect some anger over the incident tomorrow.

And we all have a lot to learn from the whole affair.