Two recent Orange County studies have put Newport-Mesa school
officials on alert. What they do with the results of these studies may
well open a can of educational worms.
First came a quite remarkable survey conducted by a group of 15 Santa
Ana teens who got tired of seeing their friends get pregnant and drop out
of school. Funded by a grant from the California Wellness Foundation and
the support of Campfire USA, these determined young people volunteered
their time for 18 months to survey fellow students about their sex
habits, as well as parents and teachers on what they would like to see
taught about sex in public schools.
The results said loud and clear that abstinence-focused sex education
isn't working. As one of the teen surveyors put it to a Los Angeles Times
reporter: "We want our schools to teach contraception and how to deal
with relationships. Students know they should be getting birth control,
but they don't know how to get it or how to use it."
Several months later, another survey, even closer to home, by the
California Department of Health Services found that the southern region
of Costa Mesa had 91 pregnancies per 1,000 teenage girls, almost twice
the average for both Orange County and the state of California. A
parallel study by Planned Parenthood found that Latina youths in Orange
County are sexually active earlier and more frequently (44% of Latino
males by age 14 and 35% of Latinas by age 15) than average U.S. teens.
These studies took place in the aftermath of U.S. Surgeon Gen. David
Satcher's report on the nation's sexual health in which he strongly urged
sex education that would inform public school students about birth
control, a position echoed by Secretary of State Colin Powell and --
according to a Kaiser Family Foundation Study -- about two-thirds of
parents surveyed.
There are other numbers, pointing to the same conclusions, but that's
enough to wonder what use the people who run the Newport-Mesa schools
plan to make of this information. I asked that question of Supt. Robert
Barbot and the school board's president, Judy Franco. And I got educated
first.
Sex education in Newport-Mesa schools, I was told, is uniform
throughout the district. It is taught as a regular segment of the
10th-grade health program. When a student signs up for this class, a
letter goes home describing the content and materials to be used. At the
bottom is a form parents must sign requesting the class for their child.
