Students at Myron L. Powell Elementary School in Cedarville, N.J. aren’t just learning about reading, writing and arithmetic this fall. They’re also getting homework assignments with hypothetical scenarios about going to “an awesome party,” getting wasted, having sex with random people they don’t know and and ending up with a nasty case of genital herpes.
Amy Loper, the mother of a 13-year-old boy at the South Jersey grade school, said her son came home with the language arts class homework assignment recently, according to NBC Philadelphia.
The assignment asked 13- and 14-year-old students to respond to respond to the following situation:
“You had a really rotten day, but lucky for you your best friend is having an awesome party later. You go to the party and start drinking. You have a little too much to drink and start talking to this girl/guy you’ve never seen before. You head upstairs to get better acquainted despite several friends telling you that you don’t even know this person. You end up having sex with this person. The next day you really can’t remember everything that happened and rely on your best friend to fill you in. A week later you find out that you contracted herpes from your one night stand and that this is a disease you will have all your life and never know when an outbreak will occur.”
The local school district superintendent, Shelleymarie Magan according to the school website, told Loper that the “awesome party” assignment is an essential part of the eighth-grade curriculum. It comes from a book distributed to students called “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens” — “a step-by-step guide to help you” and “a true gift for the teenage soul.” The author is Sean Covey (the son of the guy who wrote “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People“).
Loper said she was stunned at the eighth-grade assignment.
“I don’t think it’s age appropriate,” the mad mother told CBS New York. “I just don’t understand why anybody thinks this is appropriate.”
Loper said she thinks eighth graders could do without reflecting on underage drinking, random sex and serious venereal diseases.
“I’m not beyond knowing that this kind of stuff happens,” she told CBS. “But to just throw it out in language arts, as just nonchalant ‘oh underage drinking, unprotected sex, whatever. If you do it, what are you gonna do about it?’ That’s how it comes across.”
Loper said she the assignment would make a bit more sense to her if it was part of the sex education curriculum in a health class.
She also noted that her son did not do the assignment. He was amused by it, though.
“At 13, he thought it was hilarious,” she told the CBS affiliate.
The superintendent told Loper that she could have her son sit out of sex education. It does not appear that she can also opt him out of language arts class.
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