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Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Abstinence-Only Programs in Charleston County Schools

By Ashley Taylor

CHARLESTON, S.C. – The majority of the Charleston County School Board voted Monday to keep an abstinence-only program as part of their sex education curriculum.

According to WCSC, the Comprehensive Health Advisory Committee voted 9-1 to remove the current program run by Heritage Community Services in order to install an up-to-date abstinence-only program. There were a total of five abstinence-only programs that were recommended by the committee and were seen as “scientifically accurate.”

Committee chairwoman Debra Miller, who has her PhD in health education, said the committee reviewed but could not approve more than 1,200 pages of the material Heritage Community sent.

According to WSCS, board member Greg Meyers convinced the majority of the board not to dismiss Heritage Community from the curriculum. Meyers felt the committee was trying to take over the functions of the board, which had already decided that parents would have the option to choose which program their child should be enrolled in.

The board apparently followed Meyer’s advice. They voted 6-3 to approve the committee’s recommendations while also including the Heritage Community Services program.

“We dealt with this 11 years ago. I thought we dealt with it in a family-friendly way and we were kind of being dragged into it…I hope it’ll quiet down,” said Meyers.

Tammy Bryant who works for Heritage Community Services said, “It’s way more than a ‘just say no’ message. Instead, it’s a very empowering message where students leave our program feeling like this is something that they can do.”

According to WCSC, the non-profit organization has provided the abstinence portion of sex education in the school district free of charge for the past 10 years. The organization is funded through state and federal grants.

“We teach them to delay sex. We teach them why they should delay sex,” Bryant said. “A lot of times this is the first time they’re being told that they can be abstinent.”

According to WSCS, Bryant said that the program has proven to be effective in that the students who take the class will be half as likely to initiate sex. Bryant also claims that they are not saying that students shouldn’t engage in safe sex.

“If the school wants to choose to bring in somebody else to also teach a safe sex message, that’s absolutely fine,” said Bryant.

According to Lisa Belton, executive director of Florence Crittendon, the abstinence-only programs that are being taught in schools are not always proven to be effective as some people believe. Florence Crittendon is a program for pregnant teens that has helped young girls in the state of South Carolina for more than a century.

Belton claims that the materials being taught have been evaluated and are seen as being helpful in persuading teens to delay the initiation of sex, but unfortunately, we must face the reality that teens are continuing to have sex at early ages.

“We always recommend abstinence as the best choice…but the reality is most teens in South Carolina start having sex between the ages of 13 and 14,” Belton said.

Since most teens today do not wait until marriage to engage in sex, it is important to give them the information and the tools they need in order to remain healthy and safe.

According to WSCS, abstinence-only programs often do not provide accurate information and they tend to discourage the use of condoms by talking about their rate of failure. Belton said, “I think we have to be real about what our young people are facing.”

When Planned Parenthood, an organization that helps pregnant teens in South Carolina, heard of the Charleston County School Board vote that would be taking place, they created a campaign that would support age-appropriate, comprehensive health education.

Planned Parenthood does not believe that abstinence-only education is the right route to take because they do not think that it is an effective way of teaching sex education. They claim that the national policy of promoting abstinence-only programs has been a $1.5 billion failure, and that young people here in South Carolina have paid the price.

They continue by saying that Charleston County has the second-highest teen pregnancy rate in the state of South Carolina. With a statistic like that, it would seem that Charleston County would make some changes to the sex education curriculum.

In an older news article from The Post and Courier by Wilbur Johnson and Kay Chitty, they write, “Many of us have reason to hope that the time has finally come when members of our Charleston legislative delegation will stop the state’s funding of one of the most wasteful government programs: abstinence-only until marriage programs.”

They continue by saying, “We don’t need to earmark any more taxpayers’ dollars to promote their ideologically-driven programs. We need to invest in real programs that will make a real difference in the health and lives of young people.”

Johnson and Chitty claim that the South Carolina Comprehensive Health Education Act is severely out-of-date and that it discourages “medically accurate comprehensive health education for a generation.” To them, the proof that South Carolina needs a change can be seen clearly in the statistics.

Unfortunately for those who are against abstinence-only sex education programs, the Charleston County School Board did approve to continue having these programs included in their curriculum. If you are unsatisfied with this decision and would like to prevent these programs from being taught in other countries across the state, the best thing for you to do would be to write a letter to your senator.

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