JACKSONVILLE, Florida, May 2, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) — A Florida school district is working on damage control after a concerned father’s viral video exposed a highly-sexualized question in what was supposed to be science homework.
Omar Austin is the father of an 11th grade student at Westside High School in Jacksonville, Florida. Last Wednesday, he posted a Facebook video highlighting a question in his daughter’s practice test for an upcoming final exam in her anatomy class.
“Ursula was devastated when her boyfriend broke up with her after having sex. To get revenge, she had sex with his best friend the next day,” the question reads. “Ursula had a beautiful baby girl nine months later. Ursula has type O blood, her ex-boyfriend has AB blood, and his best friend is type A blood.”
“If her baby daddy is her ex-boyfriend, what could the possible blood type(s) of her baby NOT be?” it asks.
“What the heck?” Austin reacted in the video. “This is just sad, and a disgrace to our educational system, and probably one of the most biased pieces of information I have ever read. Where the hell are our schools going?
As of the time of this writing, the video has been viewed approximately 71,000 times.
“The words ‘baby daddy’ and ‘baby mama’ being used, that’s foresight,” Austin told First Coast News. “The fact that she’s having sex with one guy and to get revenge on this guy she has sex with his best friend the next day? I mean, that’s just not something that I want to teach any student.”
“This was a district-generated worksheet that her teacher just printed offline and it was given to the students,” he continued. “I want it to be acknowledged. I want it to be reviewed. And I want it to be changed. I think that we can do better.”
The Media Research Center’s P. Gardner Goldsmith noted that the range of controversial subject matter the question encompasses includes “premarital sex, revenge sex, promiscuity, out-of-wedlock birth, and, given the age group of the students, what one can easily assume is statutory rape,” none of which are necessary for teaching the science of blood types.
In response, Duval County Public Schools told First Coast News that the “highly inappropriate” question was “not part of a district assignment,” and said the district initiated a review “immediately” upon receiving the father’s complaint. “Appropriate and corrective action will be taken,” the statement promised.
Last Friday, the district followed up by announcing it had discovered “another teacher in the district” had originally created the question and uploaded it to a digital platform the district uses to share education resources. “While this was not a district created item, we recognize that this falls well short of our standard of providing instructional excellence for every student, every day and we would like to apologize to the students and their families,” the new statement read.
The school district said it removed the question and promised that “corrective action is pending an internal review.”
The statement did not identify the teacher who created the question, nor did it specify whether the “corrective action” will also apply to Austin’s daughter’s teacher for using it.
Austin told Yahoo Lifestyle that he considers Westside High a “really good school with a really good principal,” where his daughter excels, but was alarmed that it “seems like they just hand out information without reviewing it.”
“Being an inner city school, (the question’s sexual topics) are already stigmas we have to get past,” he added.