Free State High School senior Rowan Plinsky sits for a conference with teacher Laurie Folsom on Thursday, Oct. 13, 2016 in Folsom's journalism class at the high school.

When it comes to politics, there are few topics that Chris Orlando, an eighth-grade social studies teacher at Lawrence’s Southwest Middle School, won’t broach with his students.

As an educator, he encourages his students to stay informed and believes in frank, open discussion of the issues affecting today’s young people.

But after news broke last Friday of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s now widely condemned 2005 admissions of kissing and groping women without their consent, Orlando found himself in a position not unique among teachers and parents across the country.

“That was so far down the crazy train that it was almost like, ‘Can I even bring that up in class?'” Orlando recalled earlier this week.

Ultimately, because of the graphic language used by Trump in the leaked “Access Hollywood” video, Orlando felt uncomfortable discussing the scandal with his students. It’s the first issue to come out of the 2016 election — a cycle, as many have pointed out, that has been unusually ugly and, at times, R-rated — that Orlando has shied away from in his classroom.

“It’s just difficult because, how do I teach the election in a responsible way when a candidate makes incendiary remarks or insulting remarks or just plain false remarks?” Orlando said. “That’s my challenge as a teacher.”

He’s not alone. Over the last week or so, there have been several articles and blogs published by national and local outlets alike ruminating on essentially the same question.

As a school psychologist, Peggy Dey has worked with young children for more than 40 years. Currently, she rotates primarily between Woodlawn, Kennedy and Pinckney elementary schools.

The teachers she’s worked with over the last four-plus decades have been adept at integrating elections into lesson plans that are both informative and age-appropriate, Dey said. But this election cycle, she speculates, might present more of a struggle for educators.

And, in her opinion as a specialist in child psychology, justifiably so.

Dey agrees with Orlando that words matter, especially in the case of young people whose moral compasses — what, for example, constitutes respectful behavior in a political setting or simply in everyday life — are heavily shaped by the messages they receive from authority figures such as the media, parents and teachers.

“I think that what we as parents and teachers have to be mindful of is the fact that kids do hear what we say, and, depending on age, they may interpret things differently,” Dey said.

As a journalism teacher at Free State High School, Laurie Folsom acknowledges that her students might possess a greater political awareness than most kids their age. A recent study out of the University of Kansas backed up this claim, finding that students enrolled in high school journalism classes are more likely to vote later in life.

She’s also had to steer her student journalists away from a tendency, she says, to at times gravitate toward sensationalism in their reporting of the election.

“They’ve been struggling with this,” Folsom said.

In the classroom, she tries to remind her students of the importance of journalistic objectivity, of acknowledging and understanding all perspectives, so that we “don’t have kids screaming at each other like the candidates are screaming at each other.” It’s a lesson she tries to impart to her own daughters as well.

Her 13-year-old, Folsom said, mainly sees Trump as “mean.” But her 16-year-old is developing a keen understanding of the political arena and her place in it as a soon-to-be woman. And her elder daughter, Folsom said, is frustrated by what she sees.

That’s where Folsom’s training — as a teacher, and as a parent — comes in.

“If we’re really teaching them, our conversation needs to be about, ‘What is your reasoning? Let’s talk about it on a deeper level instead of the emotional, reactionary level,'” she said. “As a teacher, we’ve got to be aware of what triggers us. As much as we try to be dispassionate when we’re talking about politics, there’s always going to be something that can trigger us when we’re talking about our own personal experiences.”

It’s a conversation, Orlando agrees, that’s ultimately worth having. He’s alarmed by what he sees as a “coarsening of American culture” that he believes has influenced students’ ideas of what constitutes appropriate behavior.

During the election, Orlando has heard students, for example, make “statements like, ‘If Trump can say that, why can’t I?’ or ‘If Hillary lost her emails, why can’t I lose an assignment?'” There’s also been an uptick in more aggressive assertions of opinions — and party alignment — among his students, Orlando said, echoing the divisive tone that has dominated American politics in recent years.

Last Sunday, Orlando invited his students to a watch party he’d organized at Southwest for that evening’s televised presidential debate. He was heartened to see 16 of his eighth-graders show up. Less encouraging was at least one student’s suggestion that Democrats sit on one side of the classroom and Republicans on the other, in the spirit akin to sports fans from opposing teams gathering on opposite ends of the stadium.

Only time will tell how this election’s ongoing ugliness influences children in the long haul, Orlando said. Still, crass language and questionable behavior aside, he said it’s important that his students stay informed throughout this election and for years to come. He encourages them to use media to their advantage, such as fact-checking news items on their district-issued iPads.

“I think it’s very easy for some social studies teachers to not allow anything of this (nature) in the classroom, to just ignore it, but that would be a disservice to our students,” Orlando said. “I’d rather be a little messy and work through information, work through things that aren’t true, with my students.”