It is Sunday….It is SEX!
The report is authored by Texas State University professors David Wiley and Kelly Wilson, who submitted open records requests to Texas’ 1,031 school districts (not including charter schools) for textbooks, curricula and other documents related to sexuality education. Wiley and Wilson said 990 districts, 96 percent, responded.
In the report, the researchers say:
“More than 3.7 million Texas students currently attend school in a district where they will not encounter even the most basic information about how to protect themselves from unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. … The size and location of a school district does affect the likelihood a student will encounter more comprehensive information (abstinence-plus). Students in large, urban districts still largely hear an abstinence-only message, but close to one in five districts include more comprehensive information. That is a substantially higher rate of abstinence-plus education than the state average. Compare that to rural areas, where we did not find a single instance of any information beyond abstinence among the state’s smallest districts. Worse still, 16 percent of these small, rural districts forgo sexuality education altogether.”
“If lawmakers intended [School Health Advisory Councils] to ensure appropriate content and instruction in the classroom, data gathered for this report would indicate that this experiment in local control must be judged a failure. … More than three-quarters of Texas school boards passed policies, adopted curricula and contracted with providers without any formal advice from their local SHACs. Almost a quarter (24.8 percent) of districts reported no formal policy at all governing sexuality education. Teachers in these schools must address the sensitive topics surrounding human sexuality with no guidance — or protection — from a policy adopted by the local school board.”
“A common thread running throughout materials submitted by most districts is the use of fear- and shame-based instruction about sex. … The state’s most widely used vendor-produced curriculum, Scott & White Worth the Wait, which is used in 17 percent of Texas school districts, is fairly typical in warning students that premarital sexual activity leads to depression, suicide and divorce later in life.”