Private School Takes Kids to Adult Sex Shop for Field Trip

Ben Graham | June 3, 2015
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Parents of students in a small private school in Minneapolis, Minnesota are in shock after learning about a field trip the school organized. Gaia Democratic School took a number of the their students to an adult sex shop, called the Smitten Kitten, and neglected to notify parents. School Director Starri Hedges, who is involved in the school’s sex education program, said that she wanted to provide a “safe and welcoming” environment for students to learn about sex.

“What I saw happening on our trip, I thought it was beautiful because kids could talk to these sex educators without any shame, without any fear,” Hedges said.

But, parents like Lynn Floyd were understandably distressed. His 11 and 13 year-old daughters went on the sex shop field trip. He questions what staff could have possibly been thinking. “It’s just a major breach of trust,” Floyd said. “You just can’t erase those images.”

Parents were also upset that the teachers assumed that they knew better than parents about how to educate their children about sex - and that there was a sex shop that was willing to host the obviously minor students within their walls.

Inspectors were deployed by Business License Manager Grant Wilson to investigate the incident. The Minneapolis city code says that minors can’t be exposed to “sexually provocative written, photographic, printed, sound, or published materials deemed harmful to minors.” They were cited with code violations but there were no actions taken against the shop other than an order to conform to the code.

The school made absolutely no attempt to contact parents about its plans to visit the sex shop. “I just struggled to think that I wasn’t involved in that,” Floyd said voicing his frustrations.

Hedges said that she “unfortunately didn’t communicate well enough with parents ahead of time” about the trip. Still, she maintains that “there is no right age for all kids” to learn about sex because some students “are already going through puberty at 10 or 11.”

Hedges isn’t sorry for the controversy, because the children had such a fun time:

“It was certainly the first time we have taken that kind of field trip and it will probably be our last, which I feel bad [about] because the kids had so much fun.”

But Wilson isn’t convinced: “Without looking at the laws or anything, that was poor judgment.”

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