The Lock Out

I am sure that if I worked hard enough and looked through enough yearbooks, I could remember what year The Lock Out occurred.  I am also very aware that at least one of the students who participated that night will remember and let me know.  It doesn't really matter though because what happened that night, well, to say the least, was interesting.

In those years I sponsored the school SADD group.  We had a very active chapter.  In the short period of three years we had done a promo that won us national attention through Reader' Digest, promoted a pledge campaign to not do drugs that encompassed all high schools and middle schools in the county, and created the one and only Lock Out against drugs and alcohol in the school's history.

Each of those endeavors was the brainchild of our members.  Because all three were great ideas, I not only supported them, I found ways to make sure that they would happen.  In the case of the promo, I found the contest that Reader's Digest was running and linked it to the students' passion to spread the word to not drink and drive.  Immediately, they were writing the words and lyrics to a song that they created.  Then I contacted a local recording studio. That group of professionals was extremely accommodating.  As a result, the product wasn't just a recording, we were also able to create a video that went with it.  We placed second and most of those who were involved had at least a part of their college education supplemented by the money that we won.

The newspaper campaign actually began from a discussion in my Humanities class.   A few students became agitated with the drug situation in our community.  Through that class and the SADD group, we decided we wanted to see if there were other students who felt that way.  They started to collect names on a petition to protest the use of drugs in our community.  We had such a great response in our school, one of the students wanted to see if other schools might want to join.  My students did the contacting, and soon it was all schools who participated.  That was when I contacted an editor for a local paper.  I wanted to see if the names of all of these students could be published.  He jumped on the idea and made all of the names into a supplement to the paper.  The rest is in print for posterity.

Then there was the Lock Out.  Even as I write that name, I doubt myself.  Did we call it Lock In after all?  I really can't remember.  I know we discussed Lock Out with the idea that we were locking out drugs and alcohol.  Then someone suggested that we were actually locking in all of the students who vowed to not use drugs or alcohol.  I think that I leaned towards Lock Out and won.

The title doesn't really matter.  All that you need to know is that the students wanted to celebrate all of the young people who would state that they would stay away from drugs and alcohol.  They wanted to have various activities for these students to do all night long.  I was to make sure that the students were well supervised.  Because this was our initial try at this, we didn't really anticipate more than a hundred students who would be interested, and if we got a hundred to come, we would be very happy.  We gave them a deadline of the Wednesday of the week of the Lock Out.  By the end of that day, we had 683 students who had pledged and picked up their tickets!


Because most of what we were going to do was free, we hadn't really anticipated having much in the way of food.  Some pizza shops and other local restaurants had said that they would donate food.  When we saw that there were going to be almost 700 students attending, our group had to go back out to see what they could do about getting more food.  Miraculously, we had more than enough.  To this day, I can't thank those businesses enough for believing in our kids.

So we didn't have to worry about the food.  I still had to get adequate adult supervision for the whole night.  The idea was to start at 8:00 and go until the next morning at 8:00.  When I asked parents and staff, I got plenty of people to help from 8:00 to midnight, a few from 6:00 to 8:00 the next morning, but very few for the hours between.  I had to go out and beat the bushes, but by the end of that week, I had corralled the bare minimum to feel safe.  Thankfully, we also had local police assigned as well.

Our SADD group got there early, and to their credit, they maintained their areas from beginning to end.  They were assigned to the cafeteria where there was food, and students were playing card and board games.  We had movies running in the auditorium.  One of the gyms had volleyball, another had basketball, and the other had a dance.  Once we had everything going, the 683 students, who all showed up, were scattered all over the building.

Most of the time there were no issues.  Occasionally, a student got a little loud, but for all of the young people who were supposed to be there, I can't say one thing against them.  It might have helped that adults had walkie talkies, and we used them.  After midnight, well that was a different story.

At this point I have to give credit to the one person who was with me the whole way.  My wife, Michele, was there from beginning to end.  I know that she can smile about it a little now, but from midnight to 6:00 AM we were the only adults other than an occasional police officer.  None of the people who were scheduled to help supervise in the early hours of the morning showed up.  At first it wasn't really an issue, but we had a couple of instances of disorderly students trying to crash the party from the outside.  Both were students from other high schools, and both were drunk.  Thankfully, police officers took care of both.

What I did the rest of the night was genius!  Whenever it appeared that something was needed in other parts of the building, I would jump on the walkie talkie and act like I was talking to someone on the other end.  That gave me time to get there.  Not one student questioned me or the fact that there were no other adults other than Michele and I.

When it was all over, there were students asleep everywhere.  Eventually, parents picked them all up.  The SADD group did their cleanup.  And nobody wanted to do that again.  As I write this, I can't believe we did it even that one time.