THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 14, 1996 TAG: 9607130166
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: SEX EDUCATION
HOW IS IT WORKING?
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER AND LORRAINE EATON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 82 lines
Teenagers don't get a say in creating lesson plans for sex ed. But what do they think should be taught?
The Virginian-Pilot recently gathered eight area students to draft a curriculum. In some respects, the lesson plans they came up with weren't so different from the ones used to teach them.
They believed that sex should first be discussed in the fourth and fifth grade and that birth control shouldn't be mentioned until middle school. That's the way most cities handle it.
However, unlike the school systems, they advocated a no-holds-barred approach. Nearly everything, except extreme sexual abnormalities, would be discussed in the classes they'd run. That includes the proper use of contraceptives, homosexuality, abortion and masturbation - all areas that the schools now sometimes brush past.
``To bring up condoms and birth control and not bring up (abortion), you're not giving all the options,'' said Dee Dee Love, a rising sophomore at Old Dominion University who graduated from Chesapeake's Oscar Smith High School.
They couldn't agree on whether schools should distribute condoms - something no local school now does. ``If you give out condoms, it's like saying, `Here's your shield; now go to battle,' '' said a doubtful Vorando Mack, who recently graduated from Norview High School in Norfolk. ``It's like having a man holding a gun and giving him a bullet. Is he going to load it and fire it?''
Love, however, didn't think it was a bad idea: ``There are 19- and 21-year-old guys who would not walk into a drugstore because they're embarrassed, but they're still doing it.''
The students also had a couple of suggestions for improving sex ed:
GET PARENTS INVOLVED.
Parents can make the biggest impact, but too often they don't do their jobs, the teenagers agreed. To get parents in gear, the students recommended that schools require them to take a course in talking to children about sex.
Other ideas: Send all parents a detailed sex-ed syllabus so they know exactly what's being taught. Or do what Norfolk Christian Schools does: Invite parents to have lunch with fourth-graders to start talking about sex. Martha Duffey, a recent graduate, says it helps break the ice.
School officials say they try to get parents involved. Virginia Beach, for instance, sends home study guides that give parents tips on how to broach the topic of sex. But they say it would be hard to enforce a requirement that parents take a course. Suffolk has sponsored several meetings to review the curriculum with parents, but rarely do more than a handful attend, said Nancy King, a Family Life Education resource teacher there.
HIRE SOME YOUNG TEACHERS.
Most of the teens suggested training some of their peers to help teach sex education. Sonya Islam, a rising junior at Portsmouth's Churchland High School, noted that students are already trained to be peer mediators. ``It's not like people wouldn't take them seriously,'' she said. ``You'd listen more to them than you would to a teacher.''
No local school system uses teens to teach about sex ed. ``If students saw that as a need, I would not have trouble conducting training classes,'' said Vicki Swecker, Norfolk's senior coordinator of health and physical education. But other officials wondered how students could juggle teaching duties with their own studies.
BRING IN GUEST SPEAKERS.
A young mother, or a person with AIDS, could drive home the abstinence message more effectively than a teacher, the students said.
``They throw you those statistics and everything,'' Islam said, ``but it doesn't really seem real until you see a person in your class up at, like, maybe 3 o'clock in the morning trying to get their child to sleep. Let them see that.''
Chesapeake is the only local city that allows guest speakers, such as teen moms. Officials in other cities say there are two problems with that: First, if the speaker talks to only a couple of classes, then all the city's students aren't getting the same education. Second, you never really know what the speaker will say. ``You give up control when you invite someone in the building,'' Swecker said. ``They can say anything, and we have no recourse.'' ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
PARENTAL GUIDANCE
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm] by CNB