Pennsylvania State Police
The Pennsylvania State Police Megan’s Law website, where grade schoolers were encouraged to visit during a state-sponsored assembly at Lower Merion Elementary School.
Pennsylvania state Attorney General’s Office has told parents that a staffer was “overzealous” and gave too much information to 9- and 10-year-olds in a public safety demonstration.
Parents at Lower Merion Elementary School were taken aback when their kids told them how to track killers and molesters on the Internet.
Shirley Clifford said she first heard about the assembly when her fifth-grade daughter got into the family van after school.
“She got in the car and was like, ‘Do you know there’s a website to look up murderers?’ ” Clifford said, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Her daughter was talking about the state’s Megan’s Law sex-offender database.
“I was a little surprised. It’s ideally not something I’d introduce that way,” the mother of three said.
A school district spokesman said they’d heard about it, too.
“We’ve heard from parents that students came home and they were scared, that some of the messaging was scary to them,” said Doug Young.
The talk included a joke about being kidnapped by Al Qaeda and a “homework” assignment to search the sex-offender database for nearby molesters. It was unsettling to some of the approximately 170 children in attendance.
State Attorney General spokesman spokesman Joe Peters said the presenter, whose identity was not released, is a frequent speaker at school assemblies for the office’s “Operation Safe Surf” Internet education program.
The session speaker’s lecture this week was well-intentioned, Peters said, but may have gone a little too far for elementary school students.
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