Panic! At the Playground

With the things that have been going on in our schools, we can understand when an administrator gets a little too "closure happy", and exercises his powers because of an incident. Whether that incident is a bomb threat, potential arson, or a really bad decision made by a substitute chemistry teacher, we can see where cause might be followed, especially if the action taken by the school is a simple reroute of the student's departure routes. After all, we need to be ever vigilant.

And yet that vigilance can get a little out of hand. Honestly, we don't really think that a school in Massachusetts really needed to go into lock down mode over a recent incident After all, it was just a raccoon bite.

Yes, you read that correctly. After a school crossing guard was bitten by one of the "masked" rodents, the school entered into lock down, and the students had to remain inside at the end of the day until the animal could be "disposed of". Although, we admit, there probably were a fair share of students who would have liked to potentially track down the raccoon, for any number of different reasons, so maybe the lock down was an appropriate response. After all, a mass evacuation might simply have spooked the animal, possibly even causing it to flee the vicinity.

And yes, we're aware that the animal needed to be at least captured, in order to test for rabies, but we're going to take the odds on this one and say that, if you get bit by a wild animal, go ahead and act as though you might have the disease, and get yourself taken care of appropriately. Because every time that we have to lock a school up to catch a rodent, the scavengers have already won.