here you go corky
WASHINGTON (Reuters Health) Sept 27 - A new national survey shows that sex education classes offered to public high school students are not as lengthy or as comprehensive as most parents think they should be.
It also shows that teaching sexual abstinence until marriage remains at the top of parents' sex education priorities. At the same time, the majority of parents also want their children to get more instruction about sexually transmitted diseases, contraception, and how to communicate with partners.
"The results in their entirety challenge both sides in the [sex education] debate to rethink their positions on [education] in the public schools," said Steven Rabin, senior vice president of media and public education for the California-based Kaiser Family Foundation, which conducted the survey.
Kaiser produced the results from telephone interviews with a nationwide sample of some 1500 students in the 7th to 12th grades and their parents, and 1000 public school sex education teachers from those grades. Over 300 public school principals were also surveyed.
Overall 89% of students reported having at least some sex education classes at school by the 11th or 12th grade.
Nearly all parents said that sex education classes should encourage teens to wait until they are married until having sex. But two-thirds said that the overall message to teens should be to wait to have sex, but use birth control and safe sex practice if they do not wait.
At the same time, at least 75% of parents said that classes should cover a wide range of other topics, including homosexuality, abortion, proper condom use, and how to get tested for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
"Parents, simply put, want it all," said Tina Hoff, a Kaiser researcher who conducted the study. But few sex education classes seem long enough to cover all the topics parents want their kids to know about, Hoff added. Three quarters of the teachers said that their most recent sex education course lasted one or several class periods; in contrast, three quarters of parents said it should last half a semester or more.
Shorter classes may be leaving out many topics that parents think are important. While 97% of parents reported wanting sex education classes to instruct kids on what to do if they are raped, only 59% of teens said that their classes had broached the topic. Similar gaps in parents' priorities and kids' experiences were seen in areas of homosexuality and how to talk with parents and partners about sex. "Parents are looking for real-life skills to be taught in the classroom," Hoff said.
The survey also seemed to uncover gaps between the models that schools are supposed to be using for sex education and what students are actually picking up in class. While one third of teachers and principals said that the main message of their sex education classes was "abstinence only," only 18% of students said that they had received an abstinence-only message at school.
Those numbers could mean that students who ask questions about sexual intercourse or contraception in class often get those questions answered, even by teachers mandated to teach only abstinence, said Dr. Ramon Cortines, a former New York City Schools Chancellor who was on hand when reporters were briefed on the study today.
"When the doors are closed in that classroom its hard to know what is really going on" between teachers and students, he said.
