An Initiative From Educators: Bring Values Back To The Class School Officials Are Daring To Take A Stand - To Teach

What Some Parents Don't. November 17, 1991|By David O'Reilly, Inquirer Staff Writer Last year at the Melvin H. Kreps Middle School in East Windsor, N.J., eight students ages 12 and 13 were caught having sex in a locker room and a stairwell. Angry - and confident that they were enforcing the parents' own moral standards school administrators suspended the youngsters for 10 days. The parents were furious, too. But not with their wayward children. The punishment, they protested, was severe and unjust, and they threatened to sue the Mercer County district for having failed to "ensure the safety and well- being" of the students. Still, the school held its ground. The faculty even planned ways to help the youngsters cope with the ridicule that surely would greet them on their return. The teachers shouldn't have worried: When the students walked into the lunchroom their first day back, their schoolmates applauded. "Ours is a society out of control," wrote one East Windsor teacher, Jeri Hulsizer, in a letter to the Executive Educator, a national journal. ''Somewhere along the line, children were supposed to be learning right as right and wrong as wrong. But where? Not from absent parents, most of whom seem to care more about themselves" than about their children. Hulsizer dared the public schools to make a radical move. "It's time to take the lock off values, and teach what's right and what's wrong."

The complaint is everywhere, and getting louder: There's something ailing America's children. Rudeness, irresponsibility, promiscuity, dishonesty, materialism, violence - the litany of ills has driven more adults than Jeri Hulsizer to their wits' end. A cure? Increasingly, experts think they have one: values education. If a generation of children has been sent into a moral free fall - living in homes where fathers are long gone and mothers are absent by necessity, abandoned by out-of-touch, lost-their-guts social institutions - the public schools, they say, must try to rescue them. To make children not just smart, but good. From Washington, D.C., to Bethlehem, Pa., to San Ramon, Calif., a few hundred districts already are giving it a go.