School Daze – Philly Style

The Philadelphia School Board recently announced that machines dispensing condoms at no-charge will be installed in the City’s high schools. The City’s thinking is that with a very high percentage of students being sexually active, they may as well be having safe sex.

If this is the program’s objective, then it has not gone far enough. Having safe sex involves more than a condom. Does it not also demand a safe, secure and sanitary environment? Who can say what dangerous, compromising and filthy conditions, Philly’s youth are exposed to in their quest for Eros.

Therefore, it is essential that the City provide this safe environment by setting aside a suite of rooms in each school building for the express purpose of safe and protected coupling. To ensure sanitary conditions, the City must also provide fresh linen service after each couple finishes and the next arrives.

Still academic achievement must be job one. But how can we expect students to be attentive and alert in class after exhaustive lovemaking? Teenagers are still growing children with high metabolisms. They require a high intake of calories to be at their best. Therefore, the city should also provide each couple with a post-coital room service meal of high carb foods plus an energy drink.

These initiatives will clearly meet the needs of Philly’s sexually active students. But what about the poor lonely hearts? A great number of Philly’s high school students are not sexually engaged and it is reasonable to postulate that, for many of them, this abstinence is not voluntary. These unfortunate youths are part of a long ignored underclass - the “romantically challenged”. These are the multitudes who society stigmatizes as “dweebs”, “dorks”, “geeks”, “nerds” and “losers”. We can only speculate the enormous amount of frustration and psychological damage that these unfortunates suffer by knowing that, just beyond closed doors, their luckier brothers and sisters reveling in coital bliss. The long term effects of this privation are beyond measure.

Earlier, academic achievement was cited to be ultimate aim of our American schools. But perhaps building high self-esteem is the true Holy Grail for today’s educators. As such, the damage to self-esteem that we are inflicting on these sensitive and romantically challenged youths is positively criminal. Are they not entitled to the same levels of gratification as their more gifted, attractive and charming classmates? How can they be denied this basic human right?

Therefore, it is incumbent for the City to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves. It only just that the school district provide Professional Gratification Facilitators (PGFs) to any student who requests it and demonstrates need. However, the City may save taxpayer money and encourage charity by soliciting volunteers among the more fortunate students to lend a helping hand , as it were, to their fellow students in need. Community service is another of vital part of the contemporary education experience.

It’s the right thing to do.

By Joe Siano