DATE: Tuesday, September 2, 1997            TAG: 9709020079

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER AND LORRAINE EATON, STAFF WRITERS 

                                            LENGTH:  115 lines

TEENS URGE STATE TO KEEP SEX ED

Local teen-agers have a message for members of the state Board of Education: Don't drop the state requirement to teach sex education.

The board is planning to eliminate the sex-ed mandate as part of its revisions to Virginia's school accreditation standards. The vote is scheduled for Thursday.

But teen-agers - the ones most affected by the changes but virtually absent from the debate - say the board should think again. Twelve Hampton Roads teens interviewed last week all said the state shouldn't change course.

``They should keep it like it is,'' said Cynthia Webb, a 17-year-old rising senior at Lake Taylor High School in Norfolk. ``A lot of kids learn sex from their friends, and sometimes friends give false information. And sometimes they can't talk about it with their parents.

``If the school system abolished it, some would have nowhere to turn to.''

Some students complained that, if anything, sex-ed classes should be expanded. But even in their present form, students said, the classes provide valuable information - from discussing birth control to correcting misconceptions on how to avoid pregnancy.

Information, they said, that might save their lives.

``I think sex education scares me from having sex because of the thought of getting sexually transmitted diseases,'' said Brandon Lockhart, a 16-year-old entering his senior year at Virginia Beach's Princess Anne High School. ``Some of them are pretty scary.''

The interviews last week are not the first to show the students' support for the sex education program.

In a Virginian-Pilot survey earlier this year of 999 high school seniors, 83 percent said they felt they learned enough about AIDS in class to protect themselves from it.

And in a sex-education survey of 50 students last summer, more than two-thirds said their major complaint was that there was too little - not too much - sex education in the schools.

In 1990, after a stormy fight across Virginia, the state began requiring all districts to teach sex education as part of Family Life Education, which also includes subjects such as nutrition and hygiene.

Proponents said that would help reduce the rates of teen-age pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. Opponents said it might encourage sexual activity and cancel out moral messages from home.

As a compromise, the state allows parents who are uncomfortable with the program to remove their their children from the lessons by ``opting out.''

But now the board - all of whose members were appointed by Republican Gov. George F. Allen - has proposed dropping the state requirement, to give individual school districts the final say on the controversial program.

School officials in all South Hampton Roads cities have said they intend to continue teaching the subject. But proponents fear that without a state mandate, political pressure could force school boards to scuttle the programs.

Lillian Tuttle, vice president of the state board, said the proposal ``was not a desire to side with one of these constituencies or the other. It was a desire to get out of the business of being divisive. . . .To put it very bluntly, the two sides are so far apart that there's no point of compromise.

``By taking a neutral position, it's saying we will neither prescribe it or proscribe it. We thought we were coming to a middle ground.''

Tuttle, who lives in Richmond, posed the example of a school system that doesn't want to teach it: ``Does the state board say, `You're not following the rules and we're coming after you'? Or do we say, `You're the ones who know each other; you know your neighbors. You look long and hard at your community and you decide what programs you put into place.' ''

The trouble with that argument, said Kareema Mitchell, 17, a recent graduate of Cox High School in Virginia Beach, is that ``teen pregnancy and disease is a problem in every city and county, highway or byway.''

Nationwide, 53 percent of all high school students have had intercourse and the rates increase as students move through high school, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. By their senior year, 66 percent of girls and 67 percent of boys have had sex. About 9 percent have had sex before age 13.

``It's a fact of life,'' said Mitchell, who will begin school this week at Virginia Wesleyan College. ``People have to deal with that. Their kids are going to do that (have sex) if they want to, and they need to prepare them. A lot of parents don't feel comfortable talking to their kids about it, so where else are they going to learn it, off the street?''

Gov. Allen has also supported removing the state requirement, saying that subjects such as sex education take away from time that could be spent on the basics, such as math and English.

Bailey Simon's response: ``You need to be informed on what's happening,'' said the 15-year-old rising junior at Salem High in Virginia Beach. ``English and math - that's good, you need to know that, too. But this can determine how your whole life goes.''

Webb, the Lake Taylor senior, said the classes ``give information that some kids wouldn't know about.'' And they shatter myths that teens still believe: that condoms are 100 percent effective or that women can get pregnant only one day a month.

``And they also think if a guy doesn't use a condom and he pulls out before he ejaculates, they can't get pregnant,'' Webb said. ``It's not true.''

Still, teens wish there were more information. Eric Gonzalez, 18, who graduated from Ocean Lakes High in Virginia Beach this year, said teachers didn't adequately explain how condoms work or focus on sexual diseases other than AIDS.

And too often, boys and girls were separated, said Gonzalez, who plans to enter Tidewater Community College next year. ``It's better to teach them together because they're going to be doing the act with each other,'' he said. ``That way each of them knows the proper way to keep it safe.''

Sheena Mann, 15, a rising sophomore at Norview High in Norfolk, said: ``Basically what you learn in Family Life is what you already know. You can learn about sex on TV. You can learn about dating on TV. But I do think that you need a Family Life class because you can get confused about what you see. Kids do need a clarification of what they see.''

Most students agreed that the classes probably don't result in kids having more - or less - sex than they would have otherwise. But maybe they will use a bit more care.

``I don't think it encourages or discourages'' kids from having sex, Gonzalez said. ``If their friends are doing it, they're going to want to do it. It's only helping them to think more.''

Said Mitchell: ``Even if you tell them, `Don't do it, don't do it until you get married' until you're blue in the face, it's going to happen. They just need to be safe about it.

``The students need to know they have to be careful about what they're doing.'' KEYWORDS: SEX EDUCATION FAMILY LIFE EDUCATION

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