BRODHEAD, Wis. – When officials at Wisconsin’s Brodhead High School announced Monday morning that four students were killed in a crash involving texting and driving, the reaction was what one would expect.

“A lot of our friends and fellow students actually started crying because they actually thought these people were dead, and so I think a lot of them actually called their parents in school too,” student Madison Trombley told CBS Minnesota.

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Ten minutes after the October 26 announcement, students learned their classmates were actually alive and well, and the whole thing was a stunt designed to teach them a lesson about the dangers of texting and driving.

“It wasn’t really effective,” student Sam Bolen said. “They were trying to teach using scare tactics which doesn’t teach, it just makes you not trust the teachers and any of the announcements you’re going to get.”

According to Madison.com:

There had been no advance warning to the students the announcement was fake, part of a driver-safety program initiated by the student council. Within minutes, the school principal — who had heard the original announcement while standing in a hallway — made an announcement assuring the first announcement was not true. …

The school announcements are relayed on a broadcast video, in which one of two male students seated behind a table says: “Currently today is the 26th. There have been a series of wrecks and multiple reckless driving things happening currently around Brodhead. We’ve currently lost a handful of fellow students, and we’re going to show you some images of their lives now. We’d like you to give them a moment of silence.”

As part of the program, The Washington Post reported, the four students who “died” dressed in black that day.

Brodhead superintendent Leonard Lueck told the news site he’s spent the last week fielding a flood of inquiries from media outlets about the incident, which school officials are now investigating to understand the “communication issues” that led to the scare.

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“We’ve been contacted for information by the ‘Today’ show, ‘The View,’ ‘Inside Edition,’” Lueck said.

“What we are doing is still looking at the activity itself. There were communication issues about the way it was conducted,” he said.

“If we do it again, it will have to be introduced differently,” Leuck said. “I would say we are not doing this activity again unless we can do it in a manner that wouldn’t offend other students, without providing stress to them. Then I would be in favor of it.”

Leuck said the announcement was a first for the district’s safe driving program, which also includes mock crashes, driving simulators and guest speakers, and was brought forward by the student council.

“The student council presented it to our principal,” he said. “It was an idea they got at a conference they attended.”

Bolen told the Post the announcement “went into detail about how one of them was rushed to the hospital” and did not include a notice that the incident was a simulation.

“I was pretty upset,” he said. “It is a really small school, like, most of the people really knew who they were.”

School officials told CBS Minneapolis only a few parents complained about the drill.

Others, like student council member Miranda Ryser, also defended the stunt online.

“To the people who are upset about what happened at school today, good. I hope you’re upset about it because I would rather have you upset … at the student council and the principal for a day, instead of being depressed because one of your classmates ACTUALLY died,” she posted to the Channel 15 Facebook page.

“We did this because we wanted to send a different message to our school instead of making them sit down watch a 15 minute video that they could care less about. They would be on their phones not paying attention or talking to their friends about how dumb it is.”