Principals don’t decide whether students have sex, but in New York City public schools, they do decide whether students learn about it.
Lessons about safe sex are recommended, but not required, by the city’s Department of Education, and Planned Parenthood NYC has launched a campaign to get that curriculum into every classroom.
The DOE’s sex education curriculum, which is individualized for every grade and integrated with lessons about healthy eating and staying away from drugs, is taught at the discretion of the school principal.
But for Planned Parenthood and some community groups, that’s not enough.
The organization has been making appeals to community boards to encourage parents to lobby principals to incorporate sex ed into the school year, and Harlem’s Community Board 9 and the Upper West Side’s Community Board 7 have both expressed support in the last few weeks.
“Whether it is actually taught is catch-as-catch-can. Citywide, it’s spotty and could be better,” said Mark Diller, the youth, education, and libraries committee chair of CB7.
CB9 also recently hosted a Planned Parenthood representative but is not scheduled to vote on a resolution of support until later this month.
INFORMATION GAP
Many local schools don’t teach the sex ed curriculum, according to community groups who go into schools specifically to provide health information.
The NiteStar program, which for 20 years has offered drama and musical productions about sexuality, teen pregnancy, and AIDS for teenagers, is based out of St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital and works with a number of nearby schools. Dr. Cydelle Berlin, the executive director of St. Luke’s NiteStar sex education program, said that her program is often the only source of that information.
“We are the sex education for most of the schools that invite us in. We are it,” Berlin said. But she noted that fewer schools can afford to bring the NiteStar program in, especially with federal, state and city funding cuts.
“Many schools with the most dire situations can’t afford us ... A great number of schools are not getting sex education for their students,” she said.
The campaign provides materials to help parents organize advocacy groups and prepare to ask principals to implement the DOE curriculum.
But a lack of financing is one of the key obstacles to universally taught sex education in the city, according to representatives from Planned Parenthood. “When schools are already balancing such limited resources, what we hear more often than not is that sex ed just isn’t being taught,” said Erica Sackin, a Planned Parenthood spokesperson.
Berlin acknowledged that many schools do make an effort to include sex education. “When there’s no money for a full curriculum or to bring people in,” she said, “they’ll use a gym teacher, or a film.”
But she added that these efforts often occur “when it’s too late, and they [the efforts] aren’t compelling.”
And although many of the schools her programs work with have lost their discretionary funding, “With the rising number of STIs and teen births, you’re somewhat cutting off your nose to spite yourself here.”
After dramatic declines in teen births and pregnancies from 1991 to 2005, teen birth rates in the United States increased in 2006 and in 2007, according to a National Center for Health Statistics report from March 2009.
Through the Peer Health Exchange program, a number of Columbia students teach a 12-lesson curriculum to ninth graders in high schools across the city, including workshops on sexual decision-making, contraception, STIs/HIV, rape and sexual assault, and healthy relationships.
“In most of the schools I have taught at, Peer Health Exchange is the only formal sex education they’ve received,” said Lina Gebremariam, CC ’12, who teaches the sexual decision-making workshop.
Gebremariam said that the program seeks to arm the students with the knowledge and skills they need to deal with the real world, “because high school students will be having sex whether we educate them or not.”
MANDATING SEX EDUCATION
CB7 passed a resolution on March 2 to not only to endorse the Planned Parenthood campaign but also to ask the city to mandate that schools teach the sex education curriculum.
Diller said that his colleagues on CB7, in passing the amended resolution, had expressed the view that the DOE “should from the top down mandate that sex education be taught.”
But Berlin, of the NiteStar program, said she was not all that hopeful about mandating sex education in the city.
“Prevention and sex education has always been dicey in the city in terms of ‘can we do it’ and ‘should we do it,’ but all of that requires money,” she said.
According to one survey conducted on behalf of Family Planning Advocates of New York State, 77 percent of registered state voters mistakenly believe that sex education is a part of New York’s required curriculum and 85 percent of those voters want comprehensive sex education to be taught in school.
Encouraging and empowering parents to put pressure on school principals, however, might have a better chance of making that happen than a mandate, Berlin said.
She said that her program tends to be most successful “when we get parents to cooperate with us and with the school.” Often the Parent Teacher Associations raise the money to bring NiteStar’s programs into the schools, Berlin added.
CURRENT CURRICULUM
The DOE-recommended curriculum includes “age and developmentally appropriate education” about alcohol and drug use, nutrition, physical activity, sexual risk behaviors, tobacco use, and violent behavior.
In schools where the curriculum is taught, parents theoretically still have the ultimate say over what their children hear.
The DOE confirmed that parents “may ask that their child be placed in another school setting for lessons having to do with prevention.”
And although condoms are not distributed in classrooms, parents may also request that their child not receive condoms from health resources room personnel by writing a letter to the school principal.
Furthermore, “any parent still has he right to withhold their child from classes,” said Diller, “so in my mind there is no reason not to implement the Department of Education curriculum.”
The city’s Department of Education declined to comment about the possibility of a mandated, rather than simply recommended, sex education curriculum in the future.
Dr. Berlin noted that there has been a rise of school-based clinics with the money to afford sex education and reproductive health education, particularly in high-risk schools.
But if she’s learned one thing from her time working with sex education in the city, she said, it’s that “sex ed has its ebbs and flows.”
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