MISSISSIPPI FORUM
By Marsha Meeks Kelly
In another life, I was a public school teacher. English, math and eventually “Skills for Adolescence” were the subjects that consumed my days along with an average of 140 seventh graders.
Every day I worked hard to meet the needs of my students in “inner-city” public schools in Mississippi. I remember the tears of the student who came to me to discuss her pregnancy and how she was going to tell her parents and whether she should get married at 13 years of age.
That year we started a “Peer Ears” program, a peer counseling program, and the next year we started survival skills classes called “Skills for Adolescence.” Too many pregnancies and too many sexually-transmitted diseases forced our school district to incorporate classes to educate our students about their life decisions.
Reading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report on the sexual and reproductive health of young people was depressing. So little progress has been made here! Twenty years ago several concerned Mississippians formed a statewide coalition to work with the legislature to ensure a comprehensive K-12 health education curriculum, but we still do not have even a pilot program offering students sex education, despite attempts to institute such a program in the 2009 legislative session.
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GEORGIA FORUM
By Ginny McNulty
Kids returning to school might find their lessons haven’t changed all that much from last year. That includes their school-sponsored sex education classes. Even though last spring President Obama ended federal funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs -- many of which were proven ineffective in delaying sexual activity – not much has changed yet in Georgia.
During the last school year, I spoke at numerous presentations at my high school to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS. I was repeatedly shocked at how little my fellow classmates knew about HIV/AIDS. I was asked on more than one occasion if HIV is transmitted by simple skin to skin contact. Before doing the presentations, I assumed that the students would know the majority of the information I was giving them. I was wrong.
Students repeatedly asked me about the effectiveness of condoms as protection against HIV infection. Unfortunately, I was unable to answer these curious students because school policy prohibited it. My school employed an abstinence-only policy, which extremely hindered me in giving potentially life-saving information to my classmates. On one occasion, one student confronted me during my presentation when I talked about abstinence and not about condoms. It was difficult for me to continue doing presentations after that incident because I whole heartedly agreed with him.
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