In Tense Time, Prank Is Read as Bomb Scare

By PETER APPLEBOME
Our Towns
The New York Times
June 17, 2007

MONTROSE, N.Y.

Well, it seemed a good idea at the time.

It’s senior prank season, and this was the plan for the last day of classes Monday at Hendrick Hudson High School, not far from the Indian Point nuclear plant in Westchester:

Seniors went to three $1 stores and bought about 150 alarm clocks in the shape of houses or butterflies, which would be scattered throughout the school.

They would be wrapped in duct tape, so teachers could not shut them off by removing their batteries, and set for 9:15. And when they went off, the seniors would rise and march triumphantly outside to acknowledge that the fat lady — or at least her alarm clock — had sung. They had made it through high school.

Now, with 19 students facing felony charges for placing false bombs, it’s pretty clear it wasn’t such a good idea after all. And it’s leaving everyone mulling over the questions of what’s stupid fun and what’s just stupid, and where you draw the line between reaction and overreaction in a world that’s half “Jackass” and half Age of Anxiety.

In theory, this prank wasn’t much different from the one at my local high school two years back when students planted tape recorders around the school, with the off buttons disabled, set to play music at the same time.

But there were two big differences. First, the students broke into the school Sunday night to deposit the clocks, using a key that officials knew had been missing for a year. Second, when the police responded to an alarm and found the clocks wrapped in duct tape, state troopers and bomb-sniffing dogs descended on the school, worried that the devices might be explosives.

The search quickly turned out negative, and seniors said no one ever contemplated that the clocks might be seen as bombs. “It never crossed anyone’s mind that this could be taken that way,” said Alex Kane, a senior who said he contributed $1 to the clock fund.

But the damage was done. Officials filed felony charges of placing a false bomb against the 19 students identified as being in the school during the break-in. The lead headline in the local paper read: “19 face charges in bomb prank.”

By week’s end, officials announced that the 19 charged could get their diplomas but could not attend graduation ceremonies and that those students who helped finance the operation — perhaps a quarter of the class of more than 200 — could attend graduation only if they did community service first.

Officials said that the students clearly violated school procedures by breaking into the school, and that what might have seemed a harmless prank 10 years ago isn’t funny now. Many students agreed that the rules have changed. “I think in these times when you have Virginia Tech and Columbine and all these things, it unfortunately can’t be taken like a joke anymore,” said Michael DeFilippis, a sophomore.

But most students said the penalties were far too severe for what they described as basically a misunderstanding. “You say it out loud: What did they do? Well, they put clocks in the school,” said Grace Bleiweis, another sophomore.

Indeed, most students found themselves baffled by how the senior prank had somehow been caught up in the backwash of our nervous times.

“I think we have this climate of fear now, where even if it’s a harmless senior prank, it gets tied up into thinking about terrorism,” Mr. Kane said. “I understand the need to be vigilant in the face of threats. But you need to balance that out and not have people jumping out of their seats every time something kind of goes wrong.”

Mario Velez, the state police trooper assigned to the school district, said that it wasn’t so simple, that the clocks could have been seen as dangerous devices and set off a panic in school, and that entering the school illegally added to the misbehavior.

“I know these students, and they’re good kids,” he said, “but in this case they made bad choices.”

And by week’s end it was one of those Rorschach tests for an edgy age: Is it a case of kids — and their overly protective parents — who need to face the consequences of their own bad behavior, or is it a reaction way out of proportion to the threat? (If you want to cast your vote one way or the other, let me know.)

You could get both responses, and a sense that maybe the vogue for dumb behavior celebrated on the Internet and in shows like MTV’s “High School Stories” needed some brakes. But to many people, it wasn’t just kids who are in need of some more common sense.

“Sure they should be penalized, but being charged with felonies?” said Danny Alo, an owner of Two Brothers Restaurant and Pizzeria, down the road from the school. “Let them clean toilets or cut grass or pick up garbage.

“But parents should be able to watch their kids walk down the aisle at graduation. Sure this was stupid. But no one called in a bomb threat. That’s not what this was about. They’re kids. They’re kids.”

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com