With 14 students pregnant or mothers (one out of 20 in grades 6-12) and a fifth grader having had a pregnancy scare, the Green Forest School Boad has decided on some emergency intervention — six days of sex education this year.
Story says Reality Check of Lowell will be providing the “sex education.” Depends on what you call sex education. Reality Check is a religion-cleansed (ostensibly) abstinence-only sex ed program.
The FAQs tell the story. One snippet:
There are vast differences between abstinence education and Comprehensive Sex Education. The major distinction is how each approach regards teens. Abstinence education believes teens can and increasingly do, avoid sex, so the discussion empowers them to make the healthiest sexual decision – which is to abstain. By contrast, CSE assumes that teens don’t have the ability to avoid sexual experimentation, so most of their time is spent talking about sex and the use of condoms and other forms of contraception. Comprehensive Sex Education assumes that teens will engage in high risk sexual behavior and are content to merely reduce the risk of that behavior.
Some education about condoms might have been useful in Green Forest.