What our kids are up to

Dale Yeager is a noted criminal analyst and CEO of SERAPH, Inc., a company that produces a periodic report on "The State of School Safety in American Schools," for Congress. Each year, his ream of researchers visits some 200 school districts, surveying and teaching administrators, teathers and other personnel about school safety issues.

What his team finds is profiled by Jennifer Mertens on Officer.Com:

"Truancy is the root of all school safety problems," Yeager says. "This is the frustration I hear from police departments: 'I know these kids are out running around. My people see them every day.' "

Truancy, he adds, feeds into the arena of young sexual predators, sex crimes, gang activity, negative cliques and all the problems associated with them.

"Give me a break." That's what kids want these days. And, according to Yeager, school officials and social workers are more than willing to give them one.

"Police departments need to come to terms with sex crimes," Yeager says. "More and more sexual assault and paraphelia is happening with children. We're seeing sex aggression in 6/7-year-old kids."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls the increasing number of STDs in students an epidemic. Yeager's group credits the increase to behaviors such as multiple sex partners, the popularity of oral sex in middle schools and increase of students engaged in same-sex relationships.

"You can't just say this stuff doesn't happen," he stresses. "It does and is. Oral sex has become like changing your socks. We have yet to be in a middle school that didn't have huge problems with this."

It's a school day. You may know where your kids are but do you really know what they are doing?