The sound you hear are the murmurings of abstinence-only educators as they wail with their heads stuck in the sand. A superior court judge has ruled that abstinence-only education is not a legal way of complying with
California's sex-ed laws.
The decision by Fresno County Superior Court Judge Donald Black applies only to the 40,000-student Clovis Unified School District. But as the first ruling to interpret California’s 11-year-old law on sex education and disease prevention, it should put schools on notice that “young people need complete, accurate health information required by law,” said Phyllida Burlingame, director of Reproductive Justice Policy for the American Civil Liberties Union, which took part in the suit.
“This is the first time that abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula have been found to be medically inaccurate,” Burlingame said Monday.
The ruling is the culmination of parents and their concerns over Clovis Unified's perverse sex-ed curriculum.
A group of parents in Clovis filed suit in November 2012, saying the school district was using texts and videos that focused on abstinence and made little or no mention of contraceptives or claimed they were ineffective. One video, described in Black’s ruling, compared a woman who was not a virgin to a dirty shoe. Other videos “perpetuated sexual orientation bias,” the judge said, including one that encouraged students to adopt the mantra, “One man, one woman, one life.”
This is a great ruling as California school systems has had real trouble sticking to teaching even the bare
minimum required by California law.
All of the school districts in this study reported providing HIV/AIDS prevention education and all but one reported providing sex education. Instruction was most often provided in the 7th (79%) and 9th (73%) grades, in a Health class (70%), and by a Health (55%) or Science teacher (36%). Over one‐third (37%) of districts reported no training requirement for sex education teachers. A significant minority of districts had policies which did not comply with the California Education Code. For example, one out of every five districts (21%) had non‐compliant policies that parents must sign a permission slip for their child to participate in HIV/AIDS prevention education. Additionally, one out of five districts (19%) reported that in their instruction, birth control methods were mentioned, but most of the time was spent on the benefits of abstinence. Furthermore, 16% of districts reported that they teach that “condoms are not an effective means of preventing pregnancies and STDs/HIV”, an inaccurate statement.
Many school districts did not cover HIV/AIDS prevention and sex education topics which are mandated by the California Department of Education. Just six out of ten districts (58%) taught about FDA‐ approved methods of contraception in middle and high school, and just one out of four (25%) taught about emergency contraception in both middle and high school. In comparison, eight out of ten districts (82%) taught about abstinence at the middle and high school levels.
Wow.