Middle and high school students in North Carolina will be talking about sex in a whole new way this school year.
With the introduction of the Healthy Youth Act of 2009, which passed June 30 and takes effect for 2010-2011, North Carolina public schools are required to teach students about contraceptives and sexually transmitted diseases in addition to their traditional abstinence-until-marriage curriculum. This change overrides a 1995 law which mandated that sex education courses for middle and high school students be based on an abstinence-only curriculum.
Freshman Lena Dal Santo, from Durham, was particularly involved with the legislation. Dal Santo worked with the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina, a non-profit organization that worked with the state both to pass the law and create standardized curricula after the law was passed.
“We try to reduce teen pregnancy through advocacy and stressing scientific information, which is particularly important because North Carolina has the ninth highest teen pregnancy rate in the country,” Dal Santo said.
Although Dal Santo was not involved with the organization before the bill was passed, she did work with it afterward in helping to create “effective curriculums.”
This is the second attempt to overhaul sex education in North Carolina after a 2007 reform failed. The new curriculum will teach students about the benefits of abstinence until marriage and the risks of being sexually active as well as provide information about HIV/AIDS, sexual abuse and contraceptives. With the passage of this law, North Carolina is now one of 35 states and the District of Columbia in mandating teaching about sexually transmitted diseases as part of its sexual education curriculum.
The new policy also standardizes sexual education, mandating teaching information that is “objective and based upon scientific research,” a stipulation that was not included in the old law.
The Healthy Youth Act also attempts to address the problems of HIV and teen pregnancy in North Carolina. Teen pregnancies cost the state as much as $312 million a year while pregnancy prevention programs only receive $2.5 million in funding, state Rep. Susan Fisher, one of the co-sponsors of the law, said in a statement. The new law is financially sound as well as beneficial for public health, she added.
While Dal Santo worked with the organization, APPNC worked with individual school boards in North Carolina in order to teach them about the new law, as its new provisions mandating scientific backing of the new teachings were not widely known around the state.
Dal Santo noted that although the law may help reduce teen pregnancies, there was still some opposition from some areas in the mountains and far eastern counties of North Carolina that are more socially conservative than the relativley liberal Triangle area.
“The new law still emphasizes abstinence as the best way to prevent teen pregnancies. However, APPNC wanted to make sure that education about sexually active lifestyles was available because it would be ignorant to say that they do not exist. Teens need to know how to be healthy adults, and the Healthy Youth Act definitely puts them on a better path.”
The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction had surveyed parents twice about whether they supported the changes in the law to provide a more comprehensive approach, said Erica Scott, program coordinator for NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina. In both surveys, about 91 percent of parents thought North Carolina needed more comprehensive sex education laws that included information regarding contraceptives and sexually transmitted diseases, she added.
“[This law is] not controversial, as it provides evidence-based knowledge about public health,” Scott said, adding that it has seen “uniformly positive support from parents and teachers alike.”
There have also been inconsistencies in past public instruction regarding these subjects in North Carolina, Scott said, such as schools teaching different levels of condom effectiveness.
“This law indicates that North Carolina is just as progressive as other states on sexual education,” Scott said. “It is clearly a huge positive step.”
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.