You gotta figure that anything can happen at Clark Griswold Middle School in Norwich, Conn.
Griswold, named after the character in the National Lampoon "Vacation" series (one would assume), was the scene of much consternation recently after police seized two computer hard drives.
They did so after a 12-year-old honors student downloaded a picture of a man's erect penis.
The girl's mother found the picture in her back pack and subsequently raised hell.
School officials then discovered that some of the more advanced students had been having sexually explicit conversations with strangers by way of instant messaging.
The girl who downloaded the picture said peer pressure had a lot to do with the computer activity.
"It started because my friends were doing it and I wanted to do what they were doing and it escalated from there," she was quoted as saying in the Norwich Bulletin.
She also said it was the first time she'd ever seen a picture of a man's penis.
The girl's mother said, "These kids are playing with fire and they don't know it."
We say the schools need to stick to reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic and leave the sex stuff where it belongs -- in the gutter.

Posted at June 04, 2004 02:14 PM