By WHITNEY BOYD
Palm Beach Post-Cox News Service
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
The unexpected happened to Ester Rodriguez 14 years ago when she became pregnant with her daughter, Jazmen. She was 17 and entered her senior year at Santaluces High School two months pregnant.
Friends at the high school west of Lantana had told Rodriguez that she could avoid getting pregnant if she didn't have sex often. And the scant contraceptive information at school, she said, didn't help her either.
"When I got pregnant, I was like, 'What in the world is going on?''" said Rodriguez, 31. "This was not supposed to be happening to me."
Based on sex education policies that support abstinence before marriage, Rodriguez and other students across Florida and the nation were largely left to learn contraception methods on their own - and they still are.
Florida law requires public schools to teach abstinence outside of marriage as the "expected standard" for school-age students, and the federal government has provided more than $1 billion during the past decade to states, including Florida, that have abstinence-only education programs.
But Rodriguez,who works for Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies in Palm Beach County, and some Florida school districts are jumping on a national bandwagon to broaden what students are taught in public school sex education programs.
"Teaching teenagers abstinence is great, but they need to learn more," Rodriguez said.
Focus on transmitting disease
St. Lucie County recently put itself at the forefront of the movement to go beyond abstinence-only instruction by approving a sex education curriculum that would teach students about condoms.
After months of controversial community-wide debates, the St. Lucie County School Board voted 4-1 Dec. 11 to approve the Get Real About AIDS program for use in the fourth through 12th grades. In making a case for the program, supporters noted that St. Lucie County faces a near epidemic of HIV cases in its black community, citing statistics the health department released last year.
St. Lucie County is not alone. Within the past year, school districts in Brevard and Hillsborough counties also moved from abstinence-only to abstinence-pluscurriculums similar to St. Lucie's.
The Palm Beach County School District is updating its curriculum, but the county's health department director has said the new curriculum doesn't go far enough.
Some of the new lessons for middle-schoolers include a section on several types of contraceptives and include a chart showing their failure rates. The curriculum also gives tips on how to store and use condoms and encourages teachers to invite a medical professional to demonstrate their uses.
But the Palm Beach County district won't have new lessons for all of its grades before the 2009-2010 school year.
St. Lucie County's new program will continue to teach abstinence outside of marriage but also will highlight how HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases are transmitted and how to prevent them. Other lessons discuss reasons to delay having sex, how to buy and use condoms, peer pressure, defining boundaries and limits and how to identify and get out of risky situations.
With a recent national survey showing a rise in the teen pregnancy rate for the first time in 14 years, some Florida parents and groups ranging from Planned Parenthood to the American Civil Liberties Union similarly are arguing that students need more than an abstinence-only education.
The national birth rate rose 3 percent between 2005 and 2006 among 15- to 19-year-old girls, after dropping 34 percent between 1991 and 2005, the National Center for Health Statistics reported earlier this month.
And according to the Florida Association of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, Florida has the sixth-highest rate of teen pregnancy and the second-highest rate of new HIV cases in the nation.
Based on those statistics, state Sen. Ted Deutch, D-Boca Raton, filed a bill (SB 848) this month that would require public schools to provide age-appropriate "information about the health benefits and side effects of all contraceptives and barrier-protection methods as a means of preventing pregnancy and reducing the risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections, including HIV and AIDS," beginning in the sixth grade.
The bill still would require schools to teach that "abstinence is the only certain way to avoid pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases."
If the legislature passes the bill this spring, it would become effective July 1.
Other states have taken more drastic action, even cutting off state funding for abstinence-only sex education programs.
Last month, Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine eliminated a $275,000 matching grant for a federal program that provided money for 14 nonprofit abstinence education groups in Virginia, making it the 14th state to opt for a more comprehensive sex education.
Government, law back abstinence
Other states and educators defend teaching abstinence, saying it is the only way for teens not to get pregnant.
"Teaching teens how to put on condoms is only going to get them asking, 'Where are the condoms?''" said Bill Grantly, executive director for this nonprofit group, I Am Worth I. "By pushing abstinence at all times, we can curb their minds from thinking about sex as much as we can."
Students who abstain from sex until after high school are more likely to finish school, Grantly said, citing a study from a teen planning group that stated 40 percent of mothers who have a child before 18 graduate from high school.
The federal government has three abstinence programs that can provide state-run programs aid. For the 2007 fiscal year, more than $166 million in federal aid was awarded from the three programs, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said.
Laws require state school systems accepting the federal aid to teach that a married relationship is the social norm and any sexual acts outside of marriage can be psychologically damaging.
Under Florida law, schools are to teach abstinence outside of marriage as the "expected standard" for school-age students. They also are to teach the benefits of monogamous heterosexual marriage.
But the state law is vague, and sex education varies from school to school. Even so, few schools in Florida offer comprehensive sex education, although a small and growing number is pushing for it.
As a result of its law and some programs, Florida collected almost $3 million in 2007 from one abstinence education incentive and has been awarded almost $630,000 more for the first quarter of the 2008 fiscal year, according to the Florida Department of Health.
St. Lucie did not receive any federal abstinence-only money, and its new law makes the likelihood of getting any more remote. School districts that teach "abstinence plus" are not eligible for the federal funding.
Parents request thorough program
Susan Derwin, director of the Reproductive Freedom Project for the ACLU, said federal dollars should be distributed in better preventive programs.
"It's sad that the government is still funding a sex education program that is not working," Derwin said, alluding to a decade-long study released in April that concluded that teens receiving abstinence-only education are just as likely to have sex as those receiving comprehensive sex education.
The study, which Congress authorized, followed 2,000 children from elementary school to high school from different economic levels. More than half of the students received an abstinence-only education, but half of both groups had sex before turning 17 by the end of the study.
Larry Lee, administrator of the St. Lucie County Health Department, said a 2006 report that the University of North Florida released showed that "parents want their teenagers to know proper ways to protect themselves if they decide to not remain abstinent."
According to the report, nine of 10 parents in St. Lucie County said they believe it is important for sex education to be taught in schools.
About half of the parents surveyed said abstinence is best for teenagers, but they also wanted information provided about condoms and other contraceptives. Only one of 10 parents said schools should teach abstinence without any discussion about condoms or other contraceptives, according to the survey.
Opponents of abstinence-only programs also say such programs hurt poor and minority communities the most since both tend to have limited educational resources outside public schools.
Nationally, the greatest increase in teen pregnancy was among black teens, whose birth rate rose 5 percent between 2005 and 2006, reaching 63.7 per 1,000 teens.
Low-income teens have a federally protected right to get birth control without parents' consent under Medicaid and family planning grants, but many teens don't know this until they've already become pregnant.
In Florida, however, teens otherwise generally are denied contraceptives at health clinics without parental consent.
Rodriguez, of Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies in Palm Beach County, said teens who get pregnant usually are very smart, but lack the knowledge on how to avoid teen pregnancy and STDs.
"When I talk to teenagers about my experience as a teen mother, they always want to know three things: if I was using protection, how I would react if my daughter became a pregnant teen and do I regret my life," Rodriguez said. "When I give my response, I try to be as realistic as possible so they can take me seriously."
Rodriguez, who has been educating students about sex for the past 12 years, said that, if her daughter became a teen mom, she wouldn't throw her out of the house like her parents did to her at the time.
As for regrets, she said she wishes she would have waited longer so she could offer her daughter a better lifestyle.
"Teaching sex education is a sensitive issue," Rodriguez said. "But if no one is teaching our teens about safe sex, how can we expect things to change for the better?"
