Teens should wait to have sex. That’s an easy statement on which to get agreement. But what about all the other stuff that might go into a sexual education course — like anatomy, contraception, and relationships? Right now, what children learn in sex ed depends almost entirely on where they go to school, but there are efforts in the Minnesota Legislature to change that.
Minnesota requires schools to teach students about preventing sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV/AIDS but otherwise leaves sex ed to the discretion of each school district. (A majority of health teachers responding to a state survey said they were unaware of even that requirement.)
“School districts are terrified to share information with kids, and parents don’t have a clue that their kids aren’t being equipped to grow into healthy adults,” says Brigid Riley, executive director of the Minnesota Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy, Prevention, and Parenting (MOAPPP). Others say her organization goes too far.
Last year, MOAPPP worked with state Senator Sandy Pappas (DFL-65) and Representative Neva Walker (DFL-61B) to include the Responsible Family Life and Sexuality Education bill in the larger Education Omnibus bill. The bill would establish standards for sexuality education in Minnesota’s public schools for grades 7–12, also known as “comprehensive sex education.”
“We support the idea of local control because communities should determine what’s right for them, but the baseline needs to be stronger,” explains Riley.
The baseline set in the bill emphasizes abstinence while also including medically accurate information about contraception, communication, and healthy relationships. Despite support from the House and Senate, Governor Tim Pawlenty threatened to veto the entire education bill if the comprehensive sex education provision wasn’t removed, so it was pulled. Pappas and Walker reintroduced the bill again this session.
Abstinence and protection
Jane Kleinman remembers watching “The Love Boat” after school — that’s how she learned about relationships and sex. The health science teacher and department chair at Hopkins High School in Minnetonka contrasts her own experience with the shows teens see today: the exponentially more explicit “Sex and the City” is popular and even on “Friends” the character Rachel had more than 20 partners during the show’s run. Sex, Kleinman says, is not something you can keep away from today’s teens.
“We’re not bringing things up in class and having kids say ‘I never thought of that,’” she says. “Kids see so much and are exposed to so much from the media and culture, but they don’t always know factual information. Factual aspects can be a wake-up call, but the students are very aware of sexuality and sex, and they want accurate information — that’s the message we get from students.”
Hopkins uses an “abstinence-based” sex education curriculum. That means it emphasizes abstinence as the best choice in preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections while also providing science-based information about contraception, healthy relationships, intimacy, and communication. “Abstinence-based (sex) education looks at this time in their lives mentally and emotionally and says that the best choice for students right now is to abstain,” says Kleinman.
Teaching students about contraceptives and protection against sexually transmitted infections, however, is also important. One in four teenage girls nationwide has an STI, according to a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study.
Kleinman has taught comprehensive sex ed at Hopkins for 15 years and in that time, she says, she has heard very few objections to the curriculum. Only five students have opted out entirely — which requires their parents to come up with an alternative curriculum. She credits that to strong district-wide support from parents. “I can’t say enough about our Hopkins community, which is very supportive of kids getting scientific and accurate information. It has really helped us.”
Debra Orbuch Grayson is the mother of a 10th grader, and she says she couldn’t be happier with what her child is learning. “I believe strongly the only way to accurately inform students is to give them a range of information and choices, and we do that with comprehensive sex education,” she explains. “I’d rather they learn facts and not myths from peers or elsewhere. Information is not dangerous, it is preventative.”
A tale of two tracks
About 15 miles north of Hopkins High School is Osseo School District, which, although three times larger, also serves a large swath of suburban cities in Hennepin County. The difference in Osseo’s approach to sex ed, however, is stark.
About a decade ago, a small group of parents petitioned the Osseo School Board to offer two sex ed options in the district: one track for abstinence-based classes, the other for abstinence-only education. “It was an attempt to give choices to parents because some felt like they still wanted a more comprehensive approach and some wanted a more scaled-back approach,” explains Kathy Omberg, personal development curriculum specialist for the Osseo School District.
Osseo offers health courses for one trimester in 8th grade and again in high school. Parents of students who will take the course the following year receive a letter in December explaining their choices (which include opting out of both tracks). Both tracks are centered on relationships and include information about human sexuality, violence, disease prevention, and personal health. Where the tracks diverge is on abstinence and contraception: the abstinence-only track guides students to remain abstinent until marriage and discusses contraceptives only in the context of their failure rates, while the abstinence-based track encourages abstinence as the best choice for teens while also identifying contraceptive methods, describing them, and explaining their effectiveness.
Parents have a chance to preview all materials, from textbooks to DVDs, while they make their decisions. Omberg said about 16 parents did so this year, roughly the average over the past several years. The number of parents choosing each track has also remained about the same: during the 2006–2007 school year, 62 percent of middle-school students and 71 percent of high-school students enrolled in the abstinence-based health course. Omberg says most parents are happy with how the system is set up. “I think parents appreciate having an option, any time people have a choice, they like it better than if only one option was available.”
Osseo parent Patty Landeis, mother of an 11-year-old and a 15-year-old, has chosen the abstinence-based curriculum for her children and agrees that having a choice is appealing. “I think it gives people their own opportunity to decide how they want their children to learn about sex,” says Landeis, who says she chose the abstinence-based path to reinforce what her children are learning at home. “We already had a lot of those talks with our children, and it takes a community to raise a family, so I think if they hear that same information from someone other than myself, they tend to listen to it more.”
Yet having a choice comes at a price for the district, which has to fund two separate courses — meaning double the sets of textbooks and teaching materials and more time spent writing the curriculums for teachers. However, Omberg doesn’t see things changing any time soon. “It comes up from time to time, but this is the school board’s policy, so there’d have to be a change in the policy for us to change the way we teach,” she says.
What parents want
While school districts and state government wrestle with what (and how) to teach children about sex, Minnesota parents are almost unanimously on the same page. Last year, the University of Minnesota surveyed 1,600 parents from across the state on their preferences regarding sex ed and found that 95 percent of parents want their children to learn how to avoid pregnancy and STIs if they do have sex, and 88 percent want comprehensive sex ed programs to encourage abstinence while also providing information about contraception methods. Seventy-eight percent of parents disagreed with the statement “comprehensive sex ed classes cause students to have more sex.”
Those statistics are a large reason why Rep. Walker has brought her comprehensive sex education bill back to the table for the 2008 legislative session. “If I could get every young person under 18 to not have sex, I’d wave my magic wand; but in reality, kids are at risk of pregnancy and diseases,” says Walker, who gave birth to a son at 16. “I know firsthand what information is available and what kids need to know about. We are not trying to take over the role of parents; we’re trying to add another layer of resources for parents and children.”
Walker’s legislation may go farther this year after the recent revelation that teen pregnancy rates rose in America for the first time after dropping consistently over the past 15 years. The rate of births to teenagers increased by 3 percent in 2006 alone, or about 435,000 babies born to mothers between the ages of 15 and 19, a surprising reversal from 2005, when the teenage birth rate was at an all-time low. Minnesota itself saw a slight increase in teen births between 2005 and 2006 as well (the birth rate went from 26.1 to 27.9 per thousand teens), which MOAPPP’s Program Manager Jill Farris says is too slight to declare a trend until more data from subsequent years becomes available.
“Some people in the field think we might have hit a plateau, that we can’t get much lower than what it is with what we’re doing,” says Farris. With the U.S. holding the top spot for teen pregnancy in the developed world (the teen birth rate here is nearly 11 times higher than that of the Netherlands and roughly five times higher than the rate in France) it would seem there remains room for improvement.
For Walker, that kind of improvement can only come when kids across the state get their hands on accurate information. “I think that we need to provide all forms of information to young people because they don’t stay young forever,” says Walker. “Even if they abstain until marriage, we need to do our very best to give kids the information they need to have (healthy) relationships as they grow into adulthood.”
Monica Wright is Minnesota Parent’s assistant editor.
