Middle school kids are sexually active.  Some might say that it isn’t the school or the nurses place to make sure that birth control methods are available to our kids ages 11-13.  I am not sure what I would say if I were a parent of a kid at this Maine school.  The students can only use the “clinic” if there parents have given permission but the parents do not have to give permission for their child to receive contraceptive aids. 

I thinkthis is long overdue on many levels and am saddened on entirely different levels.  The nurse as a public health advocate and official realistically sees the issue.  She knows that at least six of her female students are sexually active.  She feels it is her responsibility to make sure that they do not first and foremost get pregnant–the school also offers condoms (but we were all young and know how that works or doesn’t work sometimes).  Parents fall on both sides of the coin.  Is this the schools place?  I don’t know.  As a teacher, I see schools being held responsible for more and more things that family, church and community use to be responsible for.  Schools are expected to do so much more than simply educate the masses–they have become parents as well.  Teachers are expected to counsel, guide, and impart character education on their students on top of the educational goals set forth by the governing body. 

Schools are expected to feed kids two of their three meals a day.  Schools are responsible for making sure that students show up each day and that they behave in class and treat others kindly.  Schools have become so much more than a place where kids come to learn the three R’s.  So, on some level how can schools not start to encroach into other areas that are clearly problems for our society. 

Kids of all demographics are having sex earlier and earlier.  I remember when I was in middle school–I had barely kissed a boy yet with tongue (I was 13 when this first happened).   I was in high school when I first had intercourse and was one of the first in my group of friends.  No one I knew had sex in junior high/middle school.  I don’t know that we all at that age really understood what sex meant.  Now kids are having oral sex parties in grade school (5/6th grade).  Where the fuck has childhood gone. 

I think if anything this type of issue should raise for parents some interesting questions.  Why are kids having sex so early?  I was too busy being a jock to think much about boys at 11 and even through high school I would have rather been playing soccer than playing at sex games.  Sex was private than too.  We didn’t have parties where fellatio would be openly performed.  There is a game called “Stoneface” or something of that matter where boys will sit around a table and a girl or girls will be underneath the table giving head to a guy or guys (depending on # of girls) and the object of the game is to be able to not give away with your face which one is receiving the oral gratification.  I am sorry but this horrifying to me and I was a bit of a promiscuous teen–but I would have never thought to doing anyting for an audience. 

This is an issue that stems from our society as a whole.  Have we become so desensitized to sex that kids really treat it as a game?  Where is the value that is placed on their own self-worth.  Sexual promiscuity in pre-teen and teen girls is in many cases an search for something–usually self-worth.  I know this from personal experience.  How can we get our kids to respect themselves and each other?  How can we get parents to talk to their kids early about sex and all sides of it–the good, the bad and the ugly?  Are we so afraid of it that we don’t even want our schools to try and help?  It is obvious that we need all the help we can get as kids are younger and younger as they begin to search for something. 

Where have we failed and what can we do????