Schools stumble over sex education

Ms. Leon became involved with the Children's Aid Society Carerra Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Program in New York when she was 13. She joined, she says, because she wanted to make friends. She hoped a carefully supervised teen group might be one of the few activities her strict parents would approve.

The program changed her life, she says, giving her a chance "to focus on something else, not just on sex."

Michael Carerra, formerly a professor of health sciences at Hunter College in New York, had educated low-income teens about sex for 20 years and was often praised for his excellent classes.

But he was neither content nor convinced that he was making any progress in reducing teen pregnancy.

"I was in a battle against a tide so powerful I could not make any headway," he says. It occurred to him, however, that the best way to help teens keep sex in its proper context was to ensure that their lives have a broader outlook. To do so, he created a program that focuses on mentoring, finding jobs, counseling, listening - and learning about sex.

As part of the program, sex education combines basic information and practical knowledge about contraceptives with the chance to talk seriously about love and relationships - and why sexual activities are important and require careful thought.

Sugey Palomares and Melissa Marcial entered the program together in Brooklyn at the age of 13. In a neighborhood where teen pregnancies are the norm, they've bucked the tide and are now both in college.

Their high school provided comprehensive sex ed and yet also offered a nursery because so many students already had babies.

Sex ed at school wasn't effective, the young women say, because it was an uncomfortable setting, where asking a question would have been embarrassing.

At the program, however, they not only had classes but also a counselor they could talk to in private whenever necessary.

"They helped us to understand that you don't have to prove your love to someone by sleeping with him," Ms. Marcial says.

"They were so open with us and let us ask questions about anything," Ms. Palomares adds.

There was also a chance to actually talk to the opposite sex about things like relationships, says Richard Johnson, now a junior in college, who participated at a program site in the Bronx.

"I learned to talk to women, to respect them," Mr. Johnson says. "I just didn't know that before."

Being able to talk about male-female relationships was great, agrees Leon: "It covered emotions and feelings and it wasn't just procedural. It was real."

95% of US public secondary schools teach some kind of sex ed.

89% of the nation's 20 million public secondary school students will take at least one sex ed course between seventh and 12th grade.

58% of principals call their curriculum "comprehensive," including the message that "young people should wait to have sex but if they do not they should use birth control and practice safer sex."

34% say their school's main message is "abstinence only" before marriage.

10% of 15- to 19-year-old girls and women became pregnant in 2000.

Teen pregnancies cost taxpayers about $7 billion annually.

Sources: Kaiser Family Foundation, Alan Guttmacher Institute, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Brookings Institution

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