Friday January 19, 2007 SGN.org |
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Volume 35 Issue 03 |
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Friday, Jul 04, 2008
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Twenty-three percent of Washington's school districts ban teaching about homosexuality |
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| Twenty-three percent of Washington's school districts ban teaching about homosexuality | ||
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Nearly a quarter of the school districts in the state of Washington bar teachers from talking about homosexuality and nearly a third do not allow teachers to discus condoms. The statistics are part of a study released Tuesday by the Healthy Youth Alliance, a coalition working to reduce sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy among teens in the state. Two hundred of Washington's 296 school districts responded to a survey put out by the coalition. Even though all 200 districts said they taught HIV/AIDS prevention from grades five to twelve, 29 percent of the districts said their courses focus on "abstinence only" and forbid teachers to discuss condoms. Seventy percent of the districts surveyed said they stress abstinence in their curricula, but also include information about birth control and condom use to stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, the report noted. At an Olympia news conference to release the study state Rep. Shay Schual-Berke (D) said she will reintroduce a bill this legislative session to make medically accurate sex education mandatory in Washington schools. Schual-Berke, who also is a medical doctor, was joined by report researcher Alison Peters, Judith Billings of the Governor's Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS and Mary Meyers of the School Nurses Organization of Washington. "Young people need accurate information in order to make healthy decisions. To be effective, public school curricula should be comprehensive and include information about both abstinence and contraception," said Billings. The report cites a Kaiser Family Foundation study that found approximately 50 percent of all teens are sexually active in high school and that each year, four million teens nationwide contract a sexually transmitted disease. Courtesy of 365Gay.com |
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