PAUL SACCA
May 23, 2021
-The Blaze
Parents and students at an elite $47,000-a-year private school in New York are “shocked and mortified” about a “porn literacy” class that was added to the curriculum without their knowledge. The risqué course for juniors at Manhattan’s prestigious Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School introduced teens to adult-themed topics such as “kink and BDSM.”
Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School on the Upper West Side was founded in 1764, and is the oldest nonsectarian independent school in New York City. In 2015, Business Insider named the institution as one of the “9 most elite prep schools in New York City.” Former President Donald Trump’s son Barron attended the distinguished school. Now, the school is being condemned for the new porn literacy class that some say is indoctrinating kids.

Students aged between 16 and 17 attended a health and sexuality workshop, which most believed would be a sex-ed class. Instead, the teens were educated on everything about porn. The course, which was officially titled “Pornography Literacy: An intersectional focus on mainstream porn,” featured a list of the most-searched porn terms in 2019.

“The often-explicit slide presentation and lecture by Fonte to the 120 boys and girls included lessons on how porn takes care of ‘three big male vulnerabilities;’ statistics on the ‘orgasm gap’ showing straight women have far fewer orgasms with their partners than gay men or women; and photos of partially-nude women, some in bondage, to analyze ‘what is porn and what is art,'” according to the New York Post.

One of the topics taught to the teen girls and boys in the course was the “marketability of OnlyFans,” which is the subscription app where adults sell nude and explicit images and videos of themselves.

The porn class was taught by Justine Ang Fonte, the director of Health & Wellness at another elite prep school, Dalton. Fonte’s website boasts that she has “reveled in disrupting health education for 10 years.”

“We were all like, ‘What?'” a female student told the Post. “Everyone was texting each other, ‘What the hell is this? It’s so stupid.’ Everyone knows about porn. The worst part of it was that it took place not long before the AP tests and I had to miss both my AP classes for this.”

“We were all so shocked and mortified,” another female student said. “We were all like, ‘Why are they doing this? Why do they think it’s OK?'”

The course was taught remotely over Zoom, which may have tipped off concerned parents.

“It’s outrageous that the school is introducing pornography into a mainstream classroom and starting to indoctrinate kids. The goal of this is to disrupt families,” one parent said, and asked, “Why is the school making porn a priority as opposed to physics, art, literature or poetry?”

“No one wants to be canceled or lose their livelihood and that can be done in an instant,” a mother of one of the students said. “Most parents feel the same way I do about not going public but at the same time we’re incredibly frustrated by what’s going on. None of the parents knew this was planned. We were completely left in the dark. It makes us wonder what else the school is up to.”

Dr. William M. Donohue, the head of Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School, issued an email apologizing about the pornographic class at the elite prep school.

“The content and tone of the presentation did not represent our philosophy, which is to educate our students in ways that promote their personal development and overall health, as well as to express respect for them as individuals,” Donohue said.

“It was unfortunate that we did not better inform ourselves of the speaker’s specific content in advance,” Donohue added. “In this case, the speaker did not align with our unique CGPS mission and for this, I apologize… Going forward we will certainly learn from this experience.”