8/22/2007
Vulgar reading assignment for 8th grade students
Last week in the Oak Lawn/Alsip area, school district 126 school board members heard the concerns of parents and community members regarding a vulgar book on Prairie Junior High School's eighth-grade summer reading list. After listening to approximately a dozen reasonable appeals against it and acknowledging its excessive profanity, school board members, faculty, and administrators made an unpopular decision to defend the book.
The book, "Fat Kid Rules the World," has 61 pages where the "F" word is used and 49 pages where other profanities or obscenities are used. (Click HERE to view these **vulgar** excerpts.) This book also contains a number of sexual innuendos and references to masturbation -- all of which are unequivocally unsuitable for 13 and 14 year-olds. To make matters worse, we learned that this book also received accolades from the Lambda Literary Foundation -- the nation's leading organization for homosexual literature!
If school policy prohibits school faculty members from using this type of language in the classroom and/or addressing students with these types of vulgarities and prohibits students from using profanities amongst themselves or to teachers, then why would they allow it to be presented to their students through their curriculum and/or reading assignments?
While mature students, like the boy who brought this assignment to his mother's attention, are able to recognize how wrong and inappropriate this type of material truly is, other children are led to believe -- by their teachers no less -- that this book is a "good" read.
Parents and taxpayers in this community must be able trust that future reading assignments and selections will not expose their children to boorish material like that found in "Fat Kid Rules the World."
School District 126 board members and administrators should reevaluate the selection policy that has allowed this book, with more than 110 pages of pervasively vulgar language, to be recommended to children under their care.
Parents and taxpayers expect higher standards from school employees.
Read More:
Mom 'astonished' by 'Fat Kid' reaction (Daily Southtown)
More Inappropriate Material for Oak Lawn Children (Safelibraries.org)
|
