Lower Merion prepared to discipline students caught up in ‘I’m Shmacked’ drinking videos
Lower Merion School District officials say they’re prepared to discipline high school students seen using drugs and alcohol in YouTube videos.
The videos are part of “I’m Shmacked,” which producers call “a movie documenting the experience of a weekend at twenty of the best and biggest universities around the United States intertwined with a book and a website being pitched to major publishers and studios.”
The movie’s Facebook page already has short videos posted from visits to Temple and Penn State, but it’s not clear how Lower Merion students ended up in the mix. Regardless, those students won’t get off scot-free.
“Where we have the authority and power to act and respond, we will,” reads a letter sent to Lower Merion and Harriton high schools parents. “We are in the process of notifying parents of students that appear in the video and will do so by Thursday afternoon.”
Lower Merion, by the way, happens to be the same district where students filed lawsuits when they realized their school laptop webcams were taking photos of them at home.
The “Shmacked” crowd, meanwhile, is loving this. After local TV news outlets picked up the story, the film makers posted the following to the project’s Facebook page:
“Adults who take things completely out of context and run stories on company’s whose names they cannot manage to spell correctly ought to mind the generational gap and stay in between their lines rather than try to exploit and magnify a situation simply to scare parents and raise an audience. Big Brother is watching.”
Not just Big Brother. The eight college videos Shmacked has posted to YouTube have between 50,000 and 200,000 views apiece.
WHYY is your source for fact-based, in-depth journalism and information. As a nonprofit organization, we rely on financial support from readers like you. Please give today.