I guess the thinking is that if they don't get contact with pets at home or something, I am not sure.

My daughters 5th grade teacher asked me to rescue the class rat because the teacher got pregnant and didn't want to deal with him over the summer so we adopted him, the other rat had already died.

We had 2 females already so she knew I liked rats, I won't have them anymore though because of their short life span. My younger daughter now has class mice in her 8th grade class and she said there are 3 of them and they get going on the wheel and one of them can't keep up so he kind of hangs on while the other 2 make the wheel go around, it sounds pretty distracting the kids end up watching the mice.