Sex ed from the bottom up: Local governments should fill in the gaps in state sex ed policies

Teen pregnancy may not be the first issue that comes to mind when most UNC students are asked about sexual health issues. For starters, the majority of college students don’t qualify as teenagers anymore.

And those 18- and 19-year-old students who do qualify are less likely to become pregnant than their peers across the state. But lack of direct exposure to this issue is no excuse for ignorance about it, since its effects reach far beyond teen mothers and their children.

In its newly released 2012 action plan, the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina set an ambitious but necessary goal to reduce the state’s pregnancy rate by 30 percent between now and 2020.

The two decades between 1991 and 2011 saw a 53 percent decline in teen pregnancy in North Carolina, suggesting that the organization’s goal is feasible. But it won’t be happen without improving schools’ sex ed programs, which will require support and coordination on a local level.
UNC students should make it a priority to be informed about the problems with North Carolina’s current sex ed requirements, whose limitations likely contribute to our state’s high rate of teen moms.

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Though it is frequently co-opted by partisan politicians, sex ed doesn’t have to be a political issue. Some aspects, like education about the pros and cons of abortion, will almost always elicit strong reactions from both the left and the right. But some problems are just too basic to break down on political lines.

The most obvious of these is the fact that the state only requires sex ed in the seventh, eighth and ninth grades. Only 7.5 percent of children under the age of 13 in North Carolina have had sex, according to the report, but 68 percent of high school seniors have. By this time, the chances of them remembering the details of their seventh grade health curriculum are slim.

That leaves it up to local governments and school districts to make sex more comprehensive. Puberty education should begin in fifth grade, and more specific, possibly peer-led sex ed programs should be designed for high school.

The state’s minimal requirements have made sex ed into a sort of grassroots issue in North Carolina. The more demand there is at a local level, the more pressure school boards will feel to bring their schools’ sex ed programs up to the level they should be, especially at the high school level.

The needs of 17- and 18-yearolds are obviously different from those of their middle school counterparts. A more realistic approach is needed to ensure that sexual health remains a relevant part of the lives, not just a set of facts their gym teacher barked at them when they were 13 years old.

What the current state policy misses is the idea that sexual health is a dynamic condition. Like any other subject in school, students understand a subject differently when it becomes directly relevant to their lives.

If our state has failed to provide its teenagers with the needed resources, local governments must pick up where the state left off. If our formal education doesn’t end after the ninth grade, neither should sex ed.