Schools stumble over sex education

Abstinence programs received some government support as early as the 1980s, but in 1996 the Welfare Reform Act - signed into law by President Clinton - upped the ante by providing $50 million annually for their propagation. But it's been under the Bush administration that they have grown far more rapidly.

The federal government now funds such programs at $120 million annually, with a proposal on the table to increase that to $135 million in fiscal year 2004. States that accept such funding must agree that sex ed classes will make it their "exclusive purpose" to teach "the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity."

Today, 95 percent of US public secondary schools teach some kind of sex ed. Comprehensive sex ed is still the favored approach. But with increasing funds becoming available for them, abstinence-only programs are expected to grow rapidly over the next few years - a development that worries those who want a broader approach.

"Delay [sexual] activity, decrease the number of partners, and increase use of contraceptives," says Tamara Kreinin, president and CEO of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the US. Those, she says, should be the main goals of public sex education.

Ms. Kreinin estimates, however, that in the 1990s, after almost 50 years of sex ed, only about 5 to 10 percent of the sex ed classes in public schools were what she would call "high quality" programs.

In general, she says, there isn't enough interaction in the classroom, and few chances for students to ask the questions they really care about. Teachers have little or no training and often very low comfort levels when it comes to conducting such sessions.

"Kids want to hear about love and values and relationships," she says. "This is not something simply mechanical, it's multidimensional."

Of course this is sensitive territory, something many argue would be best handled at home. But that doesn't appear to be happening in many homes today.

"Any public health expert would tell you that the best place to learn about [sex] is at home," says Tina Hoff, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation in Menlo Park, Ca. "If this were happening we wouldn't even be having this debate."

Surveys the Kaiser Family Foundation has done of young people show a very strong desire for more information about sex, says Ms. Hoff, and children aged 10 or 11 definitely want that information to come from their parents.

However, if parents don't take advantage of that window of opportunity they may lose it, she adds. Within a few years - about the age of 13 and 14 - teens begin to say they prefer talking to their friends. Yet it's a task many parents seem to continue to shirk.

"Survey poll after survey poll shows parents believe that kids should have comprehensive sex ed in school and if you ask them if they should talk to their kids they say yes," Kreinin reports.

But when children are queried, they say they are still waiting to hear from their parents.

Some observers are baffled that parents today, who accept prime-time TV shows rife with sexual innuendo, are still so intensely uncomfortable talking about sex with their children.

"We are a sex-saturated and sex- repressed society simultaneously," says Michael Carerra, founder of the Children's Aid Society Carerra Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Program.

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