This may come as a terrible shock to certain school officials in Berks County, but some high school students have been known to (gasp) have sex with each other.
Even more shocking is the claim in a lawsuit that it is (gasp, agonized hand-wringing) legal if the students are around the same age and the sex is consensual and done in private.
Parents, preachers and others may advise against it, but such sex is none of a school official's business, unless, of course, it happens in school right in front of everybody and thus disrupts the educational process.
There are some things that should concern school officials, such as bullying or other behaviors designed to torment and abuse other students.
It seems, according to the lawsuit filed in federal court in Philadelphia, that officials of the Schuylkill Valley School District, located west of Fleetwood, got it backward.
The lawsuit said Anders Hendal and his girlfriend of two years, both 16, joined their classmates last April on a 10-day trip to Spain and Morocco, which was paid for by their families.
On the final night of the trip, the lawsuit said, another student found a way, using a cellphone, to secretly tape what they were doing in a Casablanca hotel room. After they were back in school in Berks County, it said, the creep spread the videotape of the romantic encounter around the school.
That was followed by taunting, harassment and bullying from other students, and Hendal and the girl consulted their parents. Hendal, by the way, is a straight-A student and multisport athlete, and was on student council. His father is a former school board member and mayor of Leesport.
Both families went to school officials to see if something could be done about the harassment and bullying. Instead, the officials slapped both students with four-day suspensions, even though their sexual liaison did not violate any school rules. The creep who surreptitiously videotaped them also was suspended for four days.
The lawsuit noted that the school's code of conduct prohibits sex only on school property, not in Casablanca, and Pennsylvania law says consensual sex between consenting minors is not illegal if they're within four years of age of each other.
Nobody is saying teen sex is a good idea; it's just that it's not illegal, and the lawsuit said the school had no justification whatsoever for the suspensions.
To make matters worse, the lawsuit said, school officials spread word around to school staff members about the episode, mentioning Hendal and the girl by name.
"This was an egregious invasion of privacy," Hendal's lawyer, Eric Winter of Bechtelsville, was quoted as saying.
Winter, according to various news media reports, compared what happened to Hendal and his girlfriend (they have since split up) to a tragic case in 2010 in New Jersey.
Tyler Clementi, 18, a freshman at Rutgers University, apparently jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his privacy also was invaded by other students.
Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, both also 18, secretly placed a camera in a room to catch Clementi having sex with another young man. Ravi had to spend only 20 days in jail for his conviction and Wei got off by testifying against Ravi. That is less than three weeks for the malicious destruction of another young person's life by creeps who did it just for kicks.
At Schuylkill Valley, the cruelty of other students was compounded by school officials who are supposed to protect their students, even if they engage in behavior in Casablanca that upsets school officials. (If you feel 16 is too young for love, keep in mind that Romeo's Juliet was 13.)
The pious officials of that school district may find this hard to believe, but there was sex going on even when I was in high school back in the 1950s — not nearly as much as I would have liked at the time, but some.
We did not have cellphones or other devices to facilitate peeping into people's behavior in private, so it was harder to torment them, but we did have class trips and we engaged in some of the mischief that sudden freedom often generates.
Our senior class trip was to Washington, D.C., and one of my pals dressed up as a girl with a wig, lipstick and falsies and loitered in a hotel hallway until the house detective came along. Then he dashed back into our room, occupied only by several members of the male half of the senior class. Once inside, he tore off the wig, etc., and joined the rest of us acting as innocent as lambs.
The house dick stormed into the room and nearly went nuts looking for the girl. I'm not saying it was a very nice thing to do, but we thought it was fun.
What happened to Clementi and the two young people from Berks County was not fun. It was vicious and criminal, and the behavior of the school officials at Schuylkill Valley, if the lawsuit's claims turn out to be valid, was just as bad.
The clear message those officials disseminated is this: If you get bullied in school by some creep who managed to invade your privacy to take pictures of you, and then set out to run around in school showing everybody the pictures, school officials should be the last people you consult.
They will only try to harm you further. At least that's the way it seems to be working out in one Berks County school district.
paul.carpenter@mcall.com 610-820-6176
Paul Carpenter's commentary appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
