School district rethinks its sex education plan

Published 11:06 am Tuesday, March 17, 2015

The Vashon Island School District is poised to revamp how it teaches sex education to middle and high school students.

One year after the school district received a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to improve its sexual health education program, a committee of district representatives, health professionals and other community members has proposed a 10-point plan members say will guide the district in teaching sex education in a more holistic way.

Betsey Archambault, the executive director of The DoVE Project and the chair of the committee, explained that the plan ties sexual health with overall health and links it to drug and alcohol use.

“They all have to go together,” she said. “It is like a puzzle where you need all the pieces or it is just not complete.”

Some of the education guidelines of the plan, which Archambault presented at the school board meeting last week, include promoting communication and decision-making skills necessary for teens to choose healthy behaviors; educating about all forms of birth control and disease prevention, while teaching abstinence as the only certain way to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, and addressing the health needs of all youth who are sexually active, including making condoms available at Vashon High School.

Both at the meeting and later in an interview, Superintendent Michael Soltman praised the work of the group that drafted the policy.

“I think the committee did a good job of creating a comprehensive plan around health and sex education,” he said.

Shortly after the district received word that it was one of 16 schools in the state to receive the four-year grant, which provided $500 to the district last year and will provide up to $10,000 over four years, the district’s Director of Instructional Services Roxanne Lyons created the committee. Over the last year, that group studied best practices regarding sex education in the schools and determined what community resources are available for Vashon teens. The group’s work and recommendations were guided by CDC officials, with which some members of the groups worked closely, the state’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction and the best research available, Lyons noted.

Central to the new proposal, she said, is the recommendation that sexual health be taught not as a subject unto itself, but in the larger context of healthy individuals and relationships.

Indeed, at last week’s presentation to the board, Archambault indicated the goal of the plan is to raise students’ awareness of what constitutes healthy relationships and to equip students with what they need to develop healthy relationships, including strong communication, anger management and conflict resolution skills.

The most recent data about a variety of teens’ behaviors on Vashon comes from the 2012 Healthy Youth Survey, which Archambault shared in the presentation last week. That information shows that 36 percent of 12th graders, 25 percent of 10th graders and 9 percent of eighth graders on the island reported that they were sexually active. Additionally, she said, national data from the CDC shows that one in four sexually active adolescent females has a sexually transmitted infection (STI, formerly referred to as an STD). It is widely understood that drinking influences sexual activity, and Archambault also noted that Vashon’s teen drinking rate is 50 percent higher than the state average, with 65 percent of 12th graders reporting they drank alcohol within the last month, according to the 2012 survey.

“Drinking alcohol makes it more likely to experience unwanted, unplanned and unprotected sex,” Archambault said.

Archambault also addressed teen pregnancy, noting that 34 percent of teen mothers do not earn high school diplomas and that society bears the economic costs, while the teens bear tremendous personal costs.

“Every single thing we have brought up is preventable,” she said.

As part of that prevention effort, the group has suggested making condoms available at the high school, something that many high schools have been doing for years.

“Condom use does not increase sexual activity or the age of the first encounter. They reduce the rate of STIs and HIV,” Archambault said. “If they are available, they will be used.”

The issue of condom availability came up earlier this school year, when the editor of the high school newspaper, Sophie Harrison, and a group of other students went to the principal and then the school board, requesting that condoms be made available at the high school. Harrison attended last week’s meeting and expressed support of the provision, noting that she and other students have been handing out condoms at school in recent months.

“We have already gone through 1,000,” she said.

Laura Wishik, the chair of the board, raised some concerns about the proposal and requested that the district make providing condoms a pilot program, saying she wants the district’s actions to be based on science and evaluated after one year. After researching the issue on her own, she said she believes the science behind schools providing condoms is weak all around.

“We don’t have very good data,” she said.

In an interview following the meeting, she questioned whether the district is the right entity to hand out condoms.

“We do not do a lot of things that would make sense for our students because it is not our role,” she added.

She also cautioned people against assuming that providing condoms will solve all the problems people would like them to solve.

Bob Hennessey, a board member and a member of the committee that drafted the proposal, countered those concerns at the meeting.

“This is public health, and this is science. I don’t see what there is to debate,” he said. “There is no reason not to stick our toe in the water because it might not work as well as we thought it would.”

What’s clear, Wishik said, is that condoms should not simply be given out, but provided in a larger context, including with directions on how to use them.

Superintendent Soltman has requested the committee provide him with a recommendation for how they should be provided, but voiced his support for the condom provision overall.

“I think it’s a well-established, common practice in many high schools,” he said. “It’s not like we are breaking historic ground here.”

He added that district representatives will look at best practices or invent a method that they think might be better, but providing condoms will be done in a mindful way.

“Obviously, vending machines are the worst way to do it,” he said.

Making condoms available is a small element of the overall sexual health education plan, and district officials and committee members say they have work to do around implementing that as well. Lyons said she hopes to make a recommendation to the board this summer on new curriculum for McMurray Middle School, but making changes at the high school level and additional changes at McMurray will be more challenging because of limited time in the schedule — an obstacle she said schools across the state face, in part because of state graduation requirements.

Currently, only one semester of health is provided at the high school, and starting next year that will be when students are sophomores.

Soltman said he does not see the district adding courses, as the day is full, but rather, embedding elements in the school day as it is now.

“We will have to create experiences that can be woven into other parts of the day — home room, smart period — so that kids get regular exposure to the curriculum and concepts,” he said. “I think it is something that is going to grow over time.”

For her part, Archambault said she has many ideas on how to do that, including bringing in community partners, using the prevention specialist and getting families more involved.

“Implementation will be the fun part,” she said. “ I think that will be easy.”

It will also be guided by what the students want, she stressed.

“Otherwise we are just teaching to ourselves,” she said.

Both Hennessey and Wishik, though, say they want to take a look at the school day and thoroughly consider next steps.

“I am eager to look at the amount of time we allocate to this part of our instruction,” Hennessey said, noting the subject’s importance.

“Sex education today has evolved a long way from just teaching the mechanics of how the human reproductive system works. There is so much more kids need to know in 2015 — STDs, mental health, empowering girls how to resist being coerced, teaching boys how not to be coercive and abstinence as the best way to avoid all of it,” he said.

And, he said, he wishes it had not taken the district so long to create a new plan.

“I wish we had been earlier to the table to take a more holistic look at how we teach health and sexual health in our schools,” he said. “We’re overdue.”

The school board will meet again at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 26, at Chautauqua Elementary School.