<p>[6th-grade</a> survey: Classmate most likely to get pregnant](<a href=“Home - WND”>Home - WND)</p>
<p>This one shocked me!</p>
<p>Did the teacher ever explain the point of the survey? Not that the reason would excuse it, but it might put it in context of the pedological theory behind it - be wary of opinion polls in this political season, perhaps?</p>
<p>Chedva, I only read this article. I would think that there might be more to the story. Perhaps it will eventually be made public.
Still, I think that this can be quite traumatic to a younger person, and for some probably could be life changing. I suppose that there are some students who could roll this off their shoulder and not be bothered by it, but that might be unusual at age 11-13. Personally, from what was stated in the story, I find this survey highly inappropriate.</p>
<p>Oh, no disagreement there - I can’t imagine this survey being appropriate. No matter what the point, there were undoubtedly better methods of making it.</p>
<p>I was just wondering.</p>
<p>That is not appropriate in a science class for grade school students.
How the hell would the other 6th graders know who is going to get pg, die or become a computer geek?
I don’t think that slant would even be accurate in a sociology for high school students, because by labeling groups of kids, or what is worse , individual students, that gives the others the misguided impression that they have dodged the bullet when it likely is that they all need accurate information about health including sex ed.
I agree I think the teacher should be reassigned/retrained especially if there have been other incidents.</p>
<p>This is horrifying. I would want the teacher fired as well. </p>
<p>Maybe, <em>maybe</em> if it were set up as mock scenarios, not related to anyone actually in the class, it could be a learning experience for 6th graders. But to have real kids be the “winners” of such awards? Insulting and hurtful.</p>
<p>I don’t even like the high school surveys that ask kids (anonymously) about their drug/alcohol use, or sexual practices (in some detail.) My kids found them insulting because they weren’t at a stage where they had even thought about some of the questions asked. It verged on corrupting minors IMO. </p>
<p>OK, my kids were late bloomers.</p>
<p>mommusic-I don’t like those either. They always tell us “All questions are optional”, so I don’t answer those, because I don’t think it’s any of my school district’s business (I’m a virgin and I don’t smoke or drink).</p>
<p>I would want the teacher fired as well. The kids who “won” are most likely very scarred.</p>
<p>This really is pretty mind-boggling. It would seem to demonstrate an extraordinary lack of common sense on the part of the teacher: so much that it is hard to imagine that this was the first display of poor judgement. If the point was to reinforce some lesson about healthy behaviors, the same thing could have been done with fictional bios. I doubt that this would have passed the “ethical study” sniff test at any college or university.</p>
<p>I would add that the fact that this article comes from what appears to be a right wing religious homeschooling web site makes me somewhat suspicious. Although anything is possible.</p>
<p>The Chastain Middle School’s 6th Grade teacher’s WorldNetDaily-reported misconduct is shocking, but it does not surprise me. My daughter has encountered this sort of stealthy-to-blatant information-gathering misconduct by teachers (in her current and former public school districts) since fourth grade. Such teacher misconduct has always been an attempt by the teacher to either promote his or her personal (usually faith-based) beliefs and viewpoints, or to promote school site and/or school district-sanctioned “character education” tenets. </p>
<p>I took a look at the online version of the Jackson Public School District’s Jackson Public Schools 2007-2008 Student Handbook and Code of Conduct for Students, Parents, Teachers, and Administrators. On text Page 2 (online Page 21 of 94), under the heading “Research Based Programs and Practices,” the Handbook states: “2. Research-based practices must be proven effective. According to the definition found in Section 9101.37, research-based means the practices involve the application of rigorous, systematic, and objective procedures to obtain reliable and valid knowledge relevant to education activities and programs.” On text Page 5 (online Page 24 of 94), under the heading, “Parental Rights Pursuant to the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA),” the Handbook lists the eight PPRA-protected categories (which includes “sexual behavior or attitudes”), and states: “It is the goal of the Jackson Public School District to balance researchers’ need for information that will be used to assist public schools with students’ right to privacy. The school district will notify parents if their child will be monitored or surveyed by researchers. The notification will include the dates of the proposed research activities and will contain instructions on how to exclude their child from the activities.” </p>
<p>If the WorldNetDaily article is factual, then the “research-based practice” employed by the Chastain Middle School 6th Grade teacher was clearly in violation of the Jackson Public School District’s established standards. Also, given that parent Curtis Lyons was reported to have learned about the survey after it was conducted, then the teacher may have violated PPRA regulations, as well. I say “may have violated,” because if the teacher sent notices to parents informing them of the upcoming survey (thus providing parents with the opportunity to exclude their children from the survey), or if the teacher’s initial school year syllabus/student behavior “contract” included a statement such as, “Surveys of students may be conducted in this class during the school year,” and parents signed off on the syllabus/student behavior “contract” without reading it carefully and/or without questioning its contents, then this teacher might get off the hook, especially if s/he is skilled at walking a school district policy tightrope. </p>
<p>I am among those who think that this teacher should be fired. Unfortunately, based upon my daughter’s many personal experiences with similar teacher misconduct, I predict that the teacher will be neither suspended nor fired, but will simply get an official slap on the wrist (with an unofficial approving nod from like-minded school site and district administrators), and perhaps an intradistrict job reassignment to make it look as though the district has “handled” the problem.</p>
<p>As I said earlier, my daughter has encountered teacher misconduct of this sort many times. Incidents of this sort rarely make the news, however, because young students (and even older students) usually don’t understand when their privacy rights are being violated by a teacher; many parents also don’t know (or do know, but don’t care) when a teacher compromises their children’s and their family’s privacy. Curtis Lyons cares. I hope Lyons has grounds to sue his daughter’s school district, and if he does have grounds to sue, then I hope he wins, and wins big.</p>
<p>One final note: I agree with consolation (Post #8) that WorldNetDaily is a biased news source; however, during the past several years, I have read many WorldNetDaily reports of public school-related issues (including issues specifically pertaining to my daughter’s former school district), and I have found those reports to be factual and credible despite obvious journalistic bias.</p>
<p>Extremely weird. Shouldn’t be teaching. It’s like teaching kids to speculate and spread rumors about each other. I can imagine a middle school kid maybe passing around a survey like this, because kids are immature and sometimes quite mean, but a teacher? What is up with some of these teachers, acting like middle school kids?</p>
<p>What in God’s name was this teacher thinking? What was the purpose of such a survey?</p>
<p>Interesting that you have encountered this kind of thing repeatedly in your district, TimeCruncher. I have never seen anything even remotely like this in my district.</p>
<p>In fact, there is a periodic survey that includes questions about drug use. Parents are repeatedly informed, by letter and by email, that these surveys will be administered in school and when, and the option to refuse permission for you kid to participate is clearly stated. In addition, the surveys are completely anonymous, and involve only self-reporting, not making judgments regarding the character or behavior of other individuals. </p>
<p>I’m not sure whether this survey is given to 6th graders. It wasn’t when my S was in 6th, but since then we have gone to the middle school model and the 6th grade is in the middle school. I have the impression that they maintain a distinction between the 6th graders and the older kids, though, so it is likely that they would not give the survey to them, unless they thought that drug use appeared to be a problem at that age.</p>
<p>To Consolation: Most of the inappropriate information-gathering took place in my daughter’s former school district, which was very large (and rapidly growing), financially strapped due to state-mandated underfunding, and in sociopolitical turmoil. Not long after my daughter first enrolled, the district’s controversial superintendent was replaced by an even more controversial superintendent who was hired to destroy the district’s long-established neighborhood schools and traditional academic programs from the inside out (and succeeded in doing so). The new superintendent employed a “divide and conquer” strategy which escalated existing sociopolitical turmoil, and pit touchy-feely bleeding-heart liberal extremists against spare-the-rod knee-jerk conservative extremists. Both extremist factions viewed all children as “at-risk,” and they began digging for information to validate their shared viewpoint. Students were subjected to a number of official and unofficial (stealth) “junk science” surveys (the sort of surveys which are intentionally structured to “identify” and magnify nonexistent/insignificant “problems”), as well as to classroom activities intended to manipulate unsuspecting children into revealing private information (such as information protected under PPRA) about themselves and their families. Intrusive, heavy-handed “life skills” and “character education” programs were subsequently implemented. </p>
<p>I haven’t researched the Jackson Public School District beyond looking at the district’s and Chastain Middle School’s websites, and reading through the JPSD 2007-2008 Handbook. However, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that JPSD might be experiencing internal turmoil similar to that which was ongoing in my daughter’s former district (and is the reason I finally transferred her out). My experience with my daughter’s public school districts (particularly her former district) has been that large-scale district turmoil tends to open the classroom door to small-scale individual teacher misconduct of the sort reported in the news article cited by the OP.</p>
<p>Survey: Teacher Most Likely To Be Fired Before The End of The Year</p>
<p>The more I think about it, the more it sounds like one of those fortune teller things you play with at a slumber party.
Pick RED- then 6- you are going become a stewardess!
Pick BLUE then 3- you will die in an accident when you are 15!</p>
<p>Here’s another report: [School</a> Survey Asks Which Students Will Get Pregnant - Jackson News Story - WAPT Jackson](<a href=“http://www.wapt.com/news/16253567/detail.html]School”>Jackson, MS News, Weather and Sports - WAPT Channel 16) </p>
<p>WorldNetDaily definitely comes from a certain perspective (name one that doesn’t 
but I have noticed time and again that they break stories and then I see them in the mainstream media 2-5 days later. Now I check them pretty often <lol></lol></p>
<p>Regarding the story, outrageous doesn’t begin to describe it. Child abuse is more like it. I can’t imagine what this has done to those kids.</p>