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A fifth-grader at Bendorf Elementary got angry at a teacher who was reprimanding him. He called her a slut.

Parents at a powder-puff football game at Clark High School shouted expletives at a teacher after he warned the game would be halted if players continued fighting. In this form of flag football, the players are girls, the cheerleaders boys.

Even toddlers attending Mountain View Lutheran Preschool have on occasion come up with words so vulgar that director Verla Niebuhr blanches when asked to describe them.

Is it getting harder to raise a child who doesn't cuss?

Yes. And U.S. society seems to continue lowering the bar on its standards for acceptable language, say local educators.

But, the teachers interviewed still believe it's possible to raise children who don't cuss. They set firm standards for discourse in their classrooms.

"My mother would never let me say `suck,' " says Clark High School social studies teacher Jon Vreeken, who often hears the phrase "that sucks" in public places besides school.

Vreeken doesn't condone raw language, but believes Americans are more tolerant today than a generation ago of certain terminology, including the phrases "screwed up," "pissed off" and "hot damn." "I think what's changed is, the shock of it is gone."

He was the teacher who was verbally assailed by angry, foul-mouthed parents at the powder-puff game.

Mountain View Lutheran's preschool is for children ages 2-5. Niebuhr says inappropriate language among pupils is not prevalent, but tends to crop up most among 4- and 5-year-old boys, who enjoy experimenting with words referring to private parts of the body.

"Anything with `butt' or `fart' is hilarious," she notes. School policy is for teachers to tell a child, "We don't use that word here." When a child uses coarse language to express a valid need, teachers offer an acceptable substitute phrase.

But several years ago, Mountain View Lutheran encountered what Niebuhr calls the worst-case scenario: a 2-year-old boy who "knew every swearword in the book. He called my teachers things my teachers had never heard before."

The boy also had extreme behavioral problems, Niebuhr recalls, relating to the fact that his mother was in a witness protection program and the child himself had witnessed a violent crime. After arranging for counseling for the child, with no significant improvement in his language, the preschool finally asked him to leave. Niebuhr explains, "It was so hurtful to the other children, his language so severe."

At Bendorf Elementary, fifth-grade teacher Janet Ishkanian says pupils' vocabulary has coarsened over the 21 years of her career. In recent years only, faculty have needed to devote some time at classroom meetings on "how to respond to people when you're upset."

Third-grade Bendorf teacher Mary Pizzi says that in the primary grades, inappropriate language does crop up but usually without malicious intent.

"Most of the time it's done not in a mean way. They heard it, they use it, they see the response." Pizzi says she then asks the child if he knows the meaning of what he just said. If he says no, she says, "Well, you need to go home and ask.' "

Even children who use nasty terms seem to know the words are inappropriate, because they will drop their voice if a grown-up passes by, say Ishkanian and Pizzi.

At Clark High, Vreeken and fellow teacher Nathaniel Morrell agree that teen girls today seem more apt to use vulgar language than in the past. "You probably have boys more willing to say filthy things, crude things when a girl walks by," Morrell says. "But now, girls have become more bold in using derogatory terms as well."

Garbage talk didn't originate with young people. Cultural forces such as network TV, cable TV, talk radio and parental example are the main teachers, educators guess.

On "Roseanne," the word "bitch" was commonplace. "Seinfeld" built an entire episode upon a rhyming device that a character came up with to remember the name of his blind date, Dolores. The rhyming word, taken from female anatomy, was never spoken, but viewers got the idea.

It gets even raunchier on cable TV. MTV's "Beavis and Butt-head" pioneered the use of ripe language, followed by Comedy Central's current hit animated series, "South Park."

On "South Park," crudity, profanity and obscenity are practiced by elementary school pupils. The school cook sings lewd love songs. Jesus shows up as a TV-show host. Characters call people by a term for which "cow pie" is an upscale synonym.

Nor does it help the cause of polite speech when even legitimate news programs have to describe racial epithets or specific sex acts -- which was the case in coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial, Marv Albert trial and the President Clinton-Monica Lewinsky story.

Radio deejays use all manner of terminology, too -- and not just Howard Stern or his shock-jock wannabes.

Clark High's Morrell says he enjoys listening to a local station that plays '70s-style rock. But as a father of five, he turns the station off when the announcer starts introducing songs with comments such as, "It's time to party and get drunk off your ass."

"Just play some music and be quiet," is Morrell's reaction to the gratuitous vulgarity.

"My kids plan their schedules to watch `South Park,' " says Vreeken of his Clark High students. Regardless of what time a popular show airs, young people will find their way to it -- if it requires delayed-viewing by video, or watching it at the house of a friend with lenient parents.

One weapon available to parents who want to clean up TV trash talk is a script-editing device called TVGuardian, developed and sold on the Internet by an Arkansas businessman, J. Richard Bray. His asking price: $249.95.

The device works for programming that is closed captioned for the hearing impaired. TVGuardian compares the closed-caption text against a dictionary of offensive words and phrases. When one is spoken, TVGuardian mutes the soundtrack for that phrase.

The owner can select to have filtered-out words appear on the screen as written text. The owner can also choose between what Bray calls "tolerant mode" -- which allows a small subset of words including "Jesus," "God" and "hell" -- and "strict mode," which also filters out that subset.

According to Bray, "TVGuardian and the v-chip are two very different parents' control devices. They are complementary products. ... The v-chip is merely an automated on-off switch. ... If a program's rating exceeds the allowed rating set by the parents, the v-chip blocks the entire program. Since the v-chip is based on the broadcast ratings system, it does not work on movies played on a VCR." TVGuardian also screens a VCR tape if it is closed captioned.

But what good is high-tech hardware in a household where the adults' average conversation is in poor taste?

Niebuhr believes preschool children's primary language influence is their parents. "If they heard `rats' (at home when a parent is upset), they'd use it."

The mother of four boys ages 3-10, she appeals to her sons' pride by telling them, if a person has to "use words like that, you're not intellectual enough to retrieve a word that's more appropriate."

Niebuhr links the general decline in the politeness of American speech to spiritual decline. "I'll be honest. I think it's that we've moved away from a relationship with God. I think we have less respect for ourselves. In all this freedom of expression, we've turned away from common courtesy."

Vreeken traces the problem to overall social decline. "Our culture is just becoming tawdrier and more in-your-face."

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