Our View: In TikTok age, let's hope sense wins out

Sometimes, everyday ordinary events give us a glimpse into the world we will see someday, and we’re generally happy with what we see.

Case in point: recently, the Cloquet Middle school was inundated by an internet influence that encouraged students to vandalize the school bathrooms, record it, and place the video on TikTok, a video sharing website that’s popular among teens. It’s called a TikTok challenge, and it’s spread like wildfire across the United States, hitting Cloquet Middle School earlier this semester.

CMS principal Tom Brenner has seen these fads for years. “They’re kids. This kind of thing is normal and expected. But usually it’s something like fidget spinners, or a certain style of clothing,” he told the Pine Knot News this week. “Rarely does it turn into vandalism.”

This time it did. This latest fad involved ripping out the plastic soap dispensers, and spreading Kool-Aid on the walls of the bathrooms. That is vandalism, and while Brenner explained that the soap dispensers are relatively cheap, and that the Kool-Aid just makes a mess that’s hard to clean, that’s not the point. When vandalism becomes malicious, it’s even more disturbing than usual. That’s what happened here.

It turns out that it’s not just the teachers, staff and administration who were disturbed by the acts of vandalism, and that’s where we are particularly proud of our youth.

“There’s a culture of pride in our building, and when stuff like this happens, the authorities are told immediately,” Brenner told us.

It turns out many of the kids in the middle school knew who committed the acts and turned them in to teachers and others in the school. The perpetrators were caught immediately and dealt with appropriately. And the videos never surfaced on TikTok, as far as we can tell.

To Brenner, it shows that kids are listening. “We have instilled a sense of pride in our students: we tell them, ‘This is YOUR building; not ours. It’s built for you.’ Kids know what’s happening before the adults, and in this case a good group of kids came forward because vandalism in their building is not OK,” Brenner said.

We’re proud of the significant number of kids in the school who stood up to the vandalism and said, “This is not OK — we aren’t going to tolerate this in our school.” And when the next TikTok challenge comes around, we hope the kids realize the difference between youthful enthusiasm and a crime. We think they will.

Often, we hear about the crazy things kids do, and we fear for the future. But if the young people of today continue down this path, we can be pretty sure we’ll have a pretty good tomorrow.