A school district in Enfield, Connecticut has come under fire after is asked eighth-graders to share their sexual desires.
During a health class at the John F. Kennedy Middle School, the students were asked to show their sexual preferences in the form of pizza toppings.
The task was titled 'Pizza and Consent' and told students that 'we can use pizza as a metaphor for sex!'
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Instructions explained 'when your order pizza with your friends everyone checks in about each other's preferences, right?', before adding 'the same goes with sex!'.
The assignment then tells students to create their own 'personal pizza' that reflected their preferences.
It notes: 'what's your favourite type of pizza? Your favourite toppings? What are your pizza no-nos? Now mirror these preferences in relation to sex!'
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Examples on the assignment included 'likes: cheese = kissing' and 'dislikes: olives = giving oral'.
Parents were left outraged, with one mother saying that her 13-year-old son was confused about the meaning of different toppings.
She said: 'When he told me about it, I was absolutely shocked.
'He's 13 years old! What gives teachers the right to have that conversation with our children?'
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The mother says her son didn't know what oral meant and 'looked it up on [his] school iPad'.
Following the class, students told their parents, who shared the assignment to Facebook and spoke to Brie Quartin, who is the school district's Health and Physical Education Coordinator.
Quartin said that the assignment was due to a technical error. 'The incorrect version, as opposed to the revised version of this assignment was mistakenly posted on our grade 8 curriculum page, and was inadvertently used for instruction to grade 8 Health classes.
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'I caught the error after our curriculum revision in June but failed to post the intended version. The correct version of the assignment is for students to work in small groups to craft a pizza with toppings (no behaviors associated with said toppings) that would make everyone happy/comfortable using non-verbal communication only'.
Meanwhile, Superintendent Christopher Drezek commented on the bizarre assignment at a school board meeting, 'The truth was it was a simple mistake. And I know that there are some who may not believe that. I know there are some who don't necessarily maybe want that answer. In this particular case, I didn't even get a chance, because the person who made the mistake jumped ahead of it before I was even notified that it had happened.
'So that's what happened, and none of us is happy that it happened. No one feels worse that it happened than the person that did it.'
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Shola Lee