Palm Beach Post Editorial

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Four years after spikes in teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases prompted health department officials to urge comprehensive sex education in public schools, the Palm Beach County School District finally will begin teaching students, including those who already are sexually active, how to avoid pregnancy and STDs.

The expansion of the abstinence-based sex-ed curriculum, presented to the school board Wednesday, is a needed first step in a district where births to teen mothers jumped from 462 in 2004 to 506 in 2006. In the same span, 17 percent of teen mothers ages 15 to 19 gave birth a second time.

Even as Florida drew nearly $11''million from the federal government for abstinence-only education - the second-largest share in the nation - the state held the second-highest annual HIV infection rate and the sixth-highest teen pregnancy rate. So, as Dr. Marsha Fishbane, the health department's director for school health, noted: "We are just beginning to scratch the surface, but this is a critical piece. We need to get the facts out."

Starting in April, teachers will get training on the curriculum changes, which mostly affect middle schoolers (introducing condoms in sixth grade and other forms of contraception in seventh and eighth grades) and ninth-graders, who previously were not taught sex education. Science teachers will teach most lessons after a few workshops. Parents can opt to excuse their child from the class.

Ultimately, the district should work to draw physicians or other medical professionals to teach the curriculum, avoiding, as Superintendent Art Johnson has feared, the potential to inject personal ideologies into what should be a medically accurate, science-based lesson.

The district also must better inform high schoolers, more than 50 percent of whom told a survey in 2005 that they have had sex.

The alarming statistics show the need for after-school programs, as thousands of parents urged in a fall survey by Prime Time Palm Beach County. Planned Parenthood's after-school clubs have successfully discouraged dozens of teens from pregnancy.

Teens involved in comprehensive sex-education programs delay sex, have fewer sexual partners and have less unprotected sex, research shows. Recognizing the cost of teen births in low graduation rates, unemployment, high crime and public health care, the Legislature should support the Florida Healthy Teens Act (Senate Bill 848), sponsored by Sen. Ted Deutch, D-Boca Raton, to require school districts to provide comprehensive sex education.

To help curb the number of teen pregnancies and STDs, school districts must ensure that those first steps are not their final steps.