THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 14, 1996 TAG: 9607140032
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: SEX EDUCATION
HOW IS IT WORKING?
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER AND LORRAINE EATON, STAFF WRITERS
LENGTH: 317 lines
A projector beamed a list of ``techniques for prevention'' onto the blackboard at the head of a 10th-grade class at Ocean Lakes High School in Virginia Beach.
The room was bright, with plants, posters of athletes, a chart of the human skeletal system. But the subject - what the sophomores were being told to prevent - was dark.
Jack Harcourt, the health teacher, was talking about AIDS. Methodically, he ticked off the precautions:
Get educated.
Say no to sex.
Don't use drugs or steroids.
Don't share razor blades, or needles for ear-piercing.
The list didn't mention condoms, even as imperfect methods to reduce the chance of getting sexual disease.
No one asked about them. Harcourt didn't tell.
The lesson illustrates the razor-thin tightrope teachers across the region must navigate as they tackle perhaps the most delicate subject in the curriculum: sex education.
Since 1990, Virginia has required all school districts to teach sex education as part of Family Life Education, a smorgasbord of topics including the dangers of smoking, the messages of the mass media and the importance of hygiene.
The idea was to reduce pregnancy rates by giving kids a middle-of-the-road alternative to the all-or-nothing approach to sex ed they might be getting outside school: The ``nothing'' sometimes coming from parents who are too embarrassed to talk about sex. The ``all'' from the media, CDs, friends - glorifying it, with hardly a word about the consequences.
Most local school systems, lobbied by vocal conservative parents, devised a program starting in elementary school that pounds home a heavy message of abstinence and includes in middle and high school a fleeting discussion of birth control.
Six years later, school officials point to the low ``opt-out rates'' - the percentage of students excluded by parents from the sex-ed lessons - as proof that their curricula have convinced even the skeptics. All local cities report at least 96 percent enrollment.
``We've earned the trust of some parents because we've done a good job,'' said Vicki Swecker, Norfolk's senior coordinator of health and physical education.
Nevertheless, the programs still face criticism from many teenagers, who think they're too timid and evasive to be of much value, and some politicians, who say they usurp parents' rights and aren't the best use of class time.
Twice in the past three years, conservative legislators, backed by Gov. George F. Allen, have unsuccessfully tried to rescind the statewide sex-ed requirement or at least institute an ``opt-in'' policy, requiring parental approval before students could be enrolled. That would virtually ensure less participation.
William C. Bosher Jr., who stepped down this month as the state superintendent for public instruction, expects the campaign to resurface in Richmond, especially with rising concerns about academic standards.
``The focus for schools should be related to English, math, science and history,'' said Bosher, who also opposes the statewide mandate. ``I want schools to be caring, nurturing environments, but primarily institutions charged with academic achievement, not the administration of social issues.''
Students, however, overwhelmingly voice a need for more, not less, sex education. Of 50 teens interviewed across Hampton Roads, more than two-thirds complained that the sex education they received was incomplete, with important subjects uncovered and difficult questions unanswered.
``In my class, there was more talk about how to dribble a basketball than sex education,'' said Sonya Islam, a rising junior at Portsmouth's Churchland High School. ``The last time I remember anybody really talking about sex ed was in sixth grade, and things change a lot.''
In Virginia Beach, ``basically almost any question, they said: `I can't answer that; you have to to talk to your parents,' '' said Jennifer Anderson, a recent graduate of Princess Anne High School.
``They would repeat over and over: `Abstinence is the only effective method.' What we have now is a program where teachers warn us against the dangers of sex, but that's it. It's a warning; it's not an education.''
Jeane L. Bentley, who began teaching in 1948 and is a former state associate director of health, physical education and driver education, agrees with the students. Bentley, who is now a consultant to the Dept. of Education, rates sex education across Virginia at a C-minus. The state standards are adequate, she said, but school systems are not following them. Courses have been watered down. ``We're not teaching what we should be teaching,'' she said. Local school administrators stand behind their programs, saying they delicately balance students' need for information with demands from citizens to avoid teaching too much, too soon.
In Portsmouth, where such subjects as condoms and homosexuality are barely mentioned even in high school, ``the School Board here does draw a line, and I'm staying with that line,'' said Jimmie Williford, the Family Life Education specialist.
But he acknowledged that for the students' sake, ``probably more information would not be bad.''
The restrictions for Virginia Beach sex-ed teachers are especially stringent. They must, among other things, not crack jokes, ``allow students to make `off-color remarks' that may set a negative tone for instruction'' or display ``materials that have not been provided for you by the school division.''
``What the School Board has attempted to do by being so strict is to make sure that information is consistent across the city,'' said Lindsay L. Shepheard, coordinator of health and physical education. ``One of the agreements by the board . . . was that teachers would follow the guidelines and curriculum exactly. That was a promise made to parents.''
All local school systems discuss methods of birth control in middle or high school, but three - Virginia Beach, Chesapeake and Portsmouth - never discuss the proper ways of using them. None of the cities distributes condoms in schools.
Sareit Hess, a rising senior at Bayside High School at the Beach, recalls a student in her class once asking: ``What happens if a condom rips?'' The teacher tabled the question with a withering glance.
Shepheard said, ``You don't teach abstinence and then tell someone to go use a condom. That flies in the face of your philosophy.''
Many students say officials are blinding themselves to the reality that teenagers do have sex and deserve to know the safest ways of engaging in it.
Dee Dee Love, a rising sophomore at Old Dominion University who graduated from Chesapeake's Oscar Smith High School, said, ``They look at us as though we live in a glass house, and it's pretty clear that society broke our glass house a long time ago. . . . If they said (`condom') more times than they said the word `abstinence,' maybe we wouldn't have the troubles we have today.''
Homosexuality is another guarded topic.
In Suffolk, where teachers never define human sexual intercourse in any grade, they don't talk about homosexuality, either. In response to questions, they'll say it's ``an alternative lifestyle, period,'' said Lovey Lyons, a Family Life Education resource teacher. The other cities mention homosexuals only when discussing AIDS.
What happens when students want more information in class? In Norfolk and Virginia Beach, they sometimes don't get it. Teachers in those cities are prohibited from answering any questions on homosexuality, abortion or masturbation; they must tell students to ask their parents.
Swecker, of Norfolk, said that was one of the compromises needed to win citywide acceptance of the program: ``We live in a community that had so much opposition to certain issues. You have to be sensitive to the needs of constituents even though we may not meet all the needs of our children or answer all their questions.''
Officials in the other cities - Chesapeake, Portsmouth and Suffolk - say students may get answers, sometimes after class. ``We can't teach about abortion, homosexuality or masturbation,'' said Cheryl Sawyer, a Family Life Education teacher in Chesapeake, ``but if there's a question, `What if a person masturbates, is there something wrong with him?' we can say, `No.' ''
Students from several area private schools - including Norfolk Collegiate School, Norfolk Christian Schools and Cape Henry Collegiate School - say they've encountered far fewer restrictions. ``It's really open,'' said David Craft, a recent graduate of Norfolk Collegiate. ``You can talk about anything. You can't be too graphic, but usually if you ask a question, you'll get an answer.''
Though students complain about the lack of information, Virginia's sex-ed program is among the more comprehensive in the country.
Virginia is one of 22 states that require both sex education and AIDS education in public schools, according to a survey by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, a private organization in New York promoting sex education.
The state is also among a minority that encourages sex education to begin before middle school.
The state's guidelines for Family Life Education, approved in 1988, require schools to cover 10 themes, including both ``the value of postponing sexual activity until marriage'' and contraception. The specifics of the lessons were left to school systems to decide.
That incited passionate multihour hearings across the region when the curricula were drawn, with sex-ed opponents fearing their children would drift into immorality and supporters forecasting serious drops in teen sex and pregnancy rates.
Both were wrong, according to researchers in sex education.
``Sex education does not produce the harm that some people fear; it does not cause people to go out and have sex,'' said Doug Kirby, research director of ETR Associates in Santa Cruz, Calif., a leading producer of sex-ed materials.
``On the other hand, some proponents will contend that it substantially reduces sexual behavior, and that claim is probably also exaggerated. What is true is that some programs have a small positive benefit. But they're not going to dramatically reduce pregnancy or STD rates.''
Studies show that, at best, sex education can delay teenage sex by an average of nine months, said William Dwyer, a psychology professor at the University of Memphis. ``It's months and not years,'' he said.
Even ardent sex-ed supporters say schools can't easily cancel out the sex-filled messages spewed by the media: Half-naked teenagers cavorting in Calvin Klein ads. Regular bedroom encounters on the TV show ``Friends.'' A fast-food commercial using double entendres on oral sex.
Even more influential is the attitude of parents.
``The thing that will keep kids abstinent is parental involvement,'' Dwyer said. ``The bottom line is, if you're going to leave adolescents unsupervised, that is going to produce all kinds of risky behaviors - drugs, smoking, booze and sex.''
Indicators such as rates of teen sex and pregnancy offer a mixed picture. Nationwide, the percentage of teenagers engaging in sex has risen over the past few decades, at the same time that the use of sex-ed programs has grown. As of 1988, the last year for which data are available, 73 percent of U.S. males and 56 percent of females reported having had intercourse before age 18, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit research organization.
Locally, however, teen pregnancy rates have dropped in all cities but Portsmouth since the introduction of Family Life. For every 1,000 teenagers, state statistics show, the number getting pregnant fell from 75.2 in 1989 to 66.9 in 1994 in Norfolk, from 53.8 to 38.4 in Chesapeake, from 53.1 to 35.5 in Virginia Beach and from 58.4 to 44.7 in Suffolk. In Portsmouth, the rate rose from 68.8 to 71.1.
In 1994, the total teen pregnancies in Hampton Roads were: Chesapeake, 479; Norfolk, 1,105; Portsmouth, 507; Suffolk, 178; and Virginia Beach, 1,114.
Analysts caution that such numbers are influenced by a tangle of factors. Nancy Welch, director of Chesapeake's health department, says the decline in the city's teen pregnancy rate may not necessarily be linked to sex education. It could just as easily reflect a dip in dropout rates or the pick-up in the economy. ``When your sense of hope is low, when the future is grim, there's more teenage pregnancy,'' she said.
None of the local school systems has undertaken a detailed evaluation of the effect of sex ed on students. Nationally, researchers such as Kirby and Dwyer say the programs proven most effective combine an early abstinence message with information on contraception during adolescence.
That approach doesn't necessarily bother Gracie Hsu, a policy analyst for the Family Research Council, which promotes conservative causes. Mentioning birth control is OK, she said, as long as ``the overriding standard is that kids recognize abstinence is expected of them and that this is the only 100 percent effective method.''
That was the message, loud and clear, in recent classes in Virginia Beach and Suffolk. During Harcourt's session at Ocean Lakes, he asked two dozen male sophomores: ``What are two freedoms you have when you are sexually abstinent?''
``You won't have to raise a kid,'' one offered.
The official list, on the projector, included more ``freedoms,'' including freedom from the pressure to marry, from guilt, from the use of contraceptives, and freedom to enjoy being a teenager.
Later, he asked about pressure for males to have sex. ``There's pressure,'' one student said. ``TV, friends, they say that they've all done it. If you are like 16 or 17 and still a virgin, they think you are a dork, or an idiot or something.''
``But how many of you think that guys lie about if they've had sex or not?'' This time, hands shot up. High. He wasn't surprised. ``Guys do this to protect themselves. That's what you guys are doing right now. I'm not taking a survey or anything, but I bet there are more virgins in here than not.''
Down the hall, his wife, Kathy, also a health teacher, was telling 30 sophomore girls about the less-than-glamorous aspects of motherhood: ``Your kids will scream and cry in church and in Farm Fresh. Your kids will pee on you. They will throw up on you. You cannot believe it's happening.
``Sleeping? There's no such thing.''
In Suffolk last month, Lyons covered the reasons to avoid premarital sex in classes for fourth- and fifth-grade boys at Robertson Elementary School. Among them: I do not want to disappoint myself or my parents. I do not want to be a parent right now. I do not want to risk getting a sexually transmitted disease.
That day, she also discussed AIDS with both classes, listing the three ways it might be contracted: by having sex or sharing needles with someone who has the disease, or being born to a woman with AIDS.
She told the fourth-graders: ``Somebody sitting here coughing can't give you AIDS. . . . Even sharing a drink with somebody will not affect you because it does not travel in saliva.''
And for the fifth-graders, a question: If Magic Johnson walked in, would you shake his hand? Some confusion in the class. ``Yes? Maybe?'' She walked up to one of the ``no's.'' ``What are you worried about?'' she asked.
``I don't know.''
She told him: ``It's the fear of the unknown that's stopping you. You can't get it from the exchange of hands unless there is exchange of blood.''
Lyons didn't flinch from any of the students' questions, either.
Fourth-grader: ``If you get a condom, could you still get AIDS?'' Laughter erupted in the room.
Lyons: ``Now, that's a good question. The answer is yes. It's considered birth-control protection, but there have been instances of people using condoms getting it. . . . There's no guarantee you won't become infected.''
Suffolk is the only city where most students surveyed expressed satisfaction with sex ed, despite the lack of discussion on certain topics and the failure to define sex itself. Jeremiah Gray, a rising senior at Nansemond River High, summed it up: ``We ask questions, and we get answers.''
Lyons has brought to class a kit of contraceptives, including a diaphragm, a condom and birth control pills, which she will show. She doesn't distribute samples, but discusses how they are used, sometimes reading from the accompanying instructions.
Routinely, though, she stresses that abstinence is the only foolproof method to avoid pregnancy or AIDS, she said. ``We think we strike the balance by giving them information on contraceptives and why they work and don't work. We give them the information for the best possible choices.''
Schools use a variety of approaches to persuade students to delay sex.
Some participate in the ``Baby Think It Over'' program: Students are given computerized dolls to take to classes and home overnight. The dolls are programmed to cry at irregular intervals; the teens must insert a ``feeding plug'' in their mouths and cuddle them, sometimes for half an hour, to quiet them.
The experience leaves many students revolted at the prospect of parenthood. ``I'm hating it right now,'' said Shekina Ward, a ninth-grader who had recently been given one of the dolls at Cape Henry Collegiate. ``I'm just taking it everywhere.''
Many schools try to offer students alternatives to sex. Sawyer, the Chesapeake sex-ed teacher, this year asked ninth-graders to come up with ``50 Ways to Say I Love You Without Doing It.'' The suggestions included ``hugging,'' ``taking a hike on nature trail,'' ``go rollerblading together.''
In interviews, students rolled their eyes at these exercises. ``Get real,'' sneered Sharon Greene, a recent graduate of Princess Anne High.
But Sawyer said, ``Even if they think it's silly, it plants a seed: `Maybe we could do this.' It just gives them options.''
Added Chris Smith, another Chesapeake teacher: ``If one of them decides not to have sex, if I save one a year, that would be great.'' MEMO: Staff writers Jon Glass and Debra Gordon, and high school
correspondents Luis Paredes and Stephanie Stevenson contributed to this
story. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
CANDICE C. CUSIC/The Virginian-Pilot
At Cape Henry Collegiate, Matt Herman gets some help cradling his
``baby.'' The ``Baby Think it Over'' program uses computerized
dolls, programmed to cry at any time, to drive home the realities of
parenthood.
Photos
CANDICE C. CUSIC/The Virginian-Pilot
LAWRENCE JACKSON/The Virginian-Pilot
Graphic
KEN WRIGHT/The Virginian-Pilot
WHAT ARE LOCAL SCHOOLS TEACHING?
SOURCE: Local school districts
KEYWORDS: SEX EDUCATION by CNB