State develops guidelines for sex education

By Lynn Thompson
Times Snohomish County Bureau

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These students talk casually about weekend sexual encounters with a boyfriend or girlfriend. They believe oral sex isn't really sex. Girls, especially, are surprised to learn they can contract diseases such as chlamydia or gonorrhea from the practice.

But health teachers in the district say oral sex is a "non-discussed issue." So is abortion. When educators talk about pregnancy, the district curriculum requires them to tell students their options are to keep the baby or give it up for adoption.

"We're very proscribed in what we can say," said health teacher Robin Russell.

In Marysville, the school district's sex-education policy emphasizes abstinence and requires teachers to cite the "documented deficiencies" of condoms and other contraceptives in preventing pregnancy and disease.

And in Federal Way, teachers discuss condoms and contraceptives, but not until the 12th grade.

While districts such as Seattle and Bellevue provide comprehensive sex education adapted to different grade levels, many others around the state condemn sex outside of marriage and give students little information about their developing bodies and sexuality.

Standardized curriculum

Now the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) and the state Department of Health have drafted guidelines for a standardized sex-education curriculum for Washington schools. The agencies are circulating the draft guidelines among public-health officials and some health educators for review and comment, aiming to make final guidelines available to interested schools by January for use anytime after that.

The draft guidelines stress the value of abstinence as the only 100 percent effective means of avoiding sexually transmitted disease and pregnancy, but they also address contraception, disease prevention, decision-making skills and access to health care.

Public-health, education and family-planning advocates say these guidelines are needed because many school districts may not be giving teenagers the information they need to delay sexual activity and avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
 
They say the guidelines — while not mandatory — will go a long way toward improving the quality and consistency of sex education in the state.

But conservative legislators and Christian-based family organizations argue schools should teach only abstinence until marriage and should not provide information about contraceptives. And, they say, local school boards should continue to decide what's taught so that curriculums reflect community values.

"The crux of the issue is, do we want kids to have sex and use contraceptives?" said LeAnna Benn, director of Teen-Aid, a Spokane organization that promotes abstinence until marriage. "Why don't we advocate what we really want?"

Except for the state requirement to teach HIV/AIDS prevention once a year to grades five through 12, Washington schools aren't required to teach sex education. If they do, the information doesn't have to be medically accurate. Parents can opt their children out of the AIDS curriculum if they review the materials and then object in writing.

Meanwhile, an estimated 60 percent of teenagers are sexually active, according to the state Department of Health. The state's teen pregnancy rates have been falling since 1990 — largely, health officials say, because of increased condom and contraceptive use — but almost 12,000 teenagers still become pregnant every year. Girls and young women 15 to 19 have the highest rate of chlamydia and the second-highest rate of gonorrhea in the state, the department said.

Go ahead anyway

When the Legislature this year failed to act on a bill that would have required the state Health Department and OSPI to draft guidelines for comprehensive sex education, 41 state legislators wrote to the directors of the two agencies urging that the guidelines be developed anyway.

Terry Bergeson, state superintendent of schools, said local districts need to "wake up" to the fact that teenagers live in a complicated, sex-saturated society.

"I know it's a hard issue," said Bergeson, who attended an all-female Catholic college. "But young people need good, honest information about their sexuality and health."

But some legislators aren't happy with the decision to proceed with state guidelines, even though they won't be mandatory.

"There are 296 school districts in the state," said Stephen Johnson, R-Kent, chairman of the Senate Education Committee. "We're talking about a sensitive, complicated subject. We ought to defer to local school districts. Seattle might be very different in what it wants to teach than Lynden."

The bill that would have mandated the development of sex-education curriculum passed the House of Representatives this past session but died in Johnson's education committee. Supporters of the bill included the Washington State Medical Association, the state Parent Teacher Association, the League of Women Voters and Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides family-planning information, contraception and abortion services.

Former Sen. Shirley Winsley, a moderate Republican from Pierce County who sponsored the bill, said she was concerned about the varied quality and thoroughness of sex education in the state, particularly as society becomes more mobile and children are less likely to finish school in the same place they started. She also said the high rates of gonorrhea, syphilis and chlamydia, particularly among teenage girls, convinced her that sex education needed to be addressed statewide.

"I didn't see it as an education issue. I looked at it as a public-health issue," said Winsley, who retired at the end of the legislative session after 30 years in the House and Senate.

Lobbying campaign

Planned Parenthood last year launched a "Plain Truth for Washington Youth" campaign to try to ensure that sex education in the state is comprehensive and medically accurate.

Brian Cutler, a community-relations officer with Planned Parenthood, said abstinence-only sex education relies on scare tactics and the message of "Just don't do it."

He equated that with giving a teenager a car to drive, but not teaching him or her where the brake or seat belts are.

"We need education along with the disincentive to have early sex," he said.

Kathy Taylor, executive director of Sexuality, Health and Relationship Education (SHARE), an Eastside sex-education training organization that works with a pregnancy clinic, Kirkland-based Life Choices, uses a different analogy. She said that when public-health officials and educators learned how dangerous cigarettes were, they launched a campaign to keep young people from smoking.

She said a similar coordinated effort to provide support to teens who don't want to be sexually active has never been attempted.

Taylor, whose organization has sent volunteer sex educators into more than 100 schools in King County, said medically accurate information about reproduction and sexual health is essential. But, she said, young people need a clear message that sex is dangerous "outside the context of a lifelong monogamous relationship."

And rather than citing statistics indicating condoms are effective in preventing HIV/AIDS and pregnancy, she said, the emphasis should be on condoms' failure rates and inability to prevent some other sexually transmitted diseases, such as genital warts.

The Seattle School District uses the FLASH curriculum developed by Seattle-King County Public Health educator Beth Reis. FLASH, which stands for Family Life and Student Health, is taught in whole or part in about 40 districts statewide. The curriculum, adopted by Seattle schools in 1988, runs from fifth through 12th grades and builds on previous years' lessons.

The materials address physical development, disease prevention, affection and interpersonal relationships, body image and gender roles. Reis said the curriculum is designed to help students understand their own values, set personal limits and discuss sexuality issues with family members or trusted adults. It also covers information about birth-control methods, their effectiveness and risks.

Reis said she believes teens can abstain from sex, just as many adults do at different times in their lives. She said the FLASH curriculum helps young people find support for that decision and gives them skills to be assertive about resisting sexual pressure.

"But from a public-health and human perspective," she said, "it's irresponsible and inhumane to throw away those other kids, to refuse to provide them the information and skills they need to reduce their risk."

Alex Estes is a member of the Planned Parenthood Teen Council and a senior at Woodinville High School. She calls information about health and sexuality "vital to young people's well-being." When the council's 12 members exchanged stories about their own school sex-education experiences, she said, some teens said they'd been taught only anatomy. Others said they didn't even get that.

Estes said teens need factual information that helps them make informed decisions about their health.

"Abstinence only works for people who are abstinent. Most aren't," she said.

The Marysville School District policy that emphasizes abstinence and calls sex outside of marriage "destructive" was adopted in 1999 after lengthy community discussion and involvement. The policy forbids the display of condoms and other contraceptives. It also says homosexuality "shall only be discussed in conjunction with education about sexually transmitted diseases."

Revamped board

But most school-board members who approved those policies have since left. Some current members say they'd like to revisit the district's rules for teaching sex education.

Board member Ronald Young has been a family nurse practitioner for 25 years and has treated teenagers with sexually transmitted diseases and unintended pregnancies. He said schools do a disservice to youth if they don't provide comprehensive and medically accurate information.

"I hope teenagers are not sexually active," he said, "but hoping is not a good birth-control method."

Lynn Thompson: 425-745-7807 or lthompson@seattletimes.com