All photos by Jon D. Clarke, Graeme Frisque, Greg Longley, Maxine Lowe, Robert Moodie and Taylor Shappert.
Journalism students at Sheridan College, near Toronto, were ordered to take down video and photos (which you can see in the gallery above) of a mock school shooting that have ruffled some feathers with the school’s faculty and administration.
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On November 25, the college hosted a training exercise for the Halton Regional Police Department. Students from the school’s musical theatre program acted as if they had been shot dead, complete with fake wounds and blood.
The scenario took place with two shooters played by plainclothes cops. About 100 students and staff participated in the event, with 15 playing dead and a further 10 playing wounded.
“To my knowledge this is the first time we’ve done something like this in a public venue. We run lockdown drills through the high schools, but never actually involving the students, they are always in lockdown mode. This is the first time it’s been interactive with people with makeup and everything,” said Sgt. Barry Hughes to the Sheridan Sun, the school’s newspaper.
The school’s in-house video production company filmed the entire exercise, while journalism students took photos, which were posted to the site of the Sheridan Sun.
However, the day after the exercise took place, Sandy McKean, associate dean of Film, Television and Journalism at Sheridan ordered that the photos and video be taken down on the basis of them being “too graphic.”
Speaking to the Sheridan Sun earlier, Sandy said he asked the content be taken down “based on professional practice in journalism because there was an excessive use of violent images.” A statement the school’s faculty disagreed with, saying that it was “censorship.”
Some have suggested that maybe the images were ordered down because having grinning, blood-covered students posing for pictures in the school hallways might be a bit of a “public relations blunder.” That seems a bit more likely than whatever Sandy McKean was rambling about.
Anyway, you can see the images in the gallery above and see video of the performance here. Enjoy!
