My fight began when my 13-year-old daughter came home from her public school about a month ago with a pamphlet she wanted me to sign for extra credit points in her health class. Being the person I am, I read the pamphlet and then I read the worksheets she had worked on in health that day. Then she and I had a very lengthy discussion.
The topic for the day? Pledging virginity until marriage. The pamphlet and the worksheet were being utilized as a piece of an abstinence-only-until-marriage program that had begun that day in her health class.
There are two main reasons why the fight I am now engaged in against this program is one that every parent should pay attention to. First, the content of the program that was being taught to my daughter was unconscionable. Abstinence-only-until-marriage programs use guilt, shame, and fear to encourage our children to apply a particular agenda to their lives. According to these programs, only monogamous, heterosexual, two-parent, married families are acceptable.
I tried to imagine how a student with loving parents at home who happen to be a same-sex couple would feel learning these lessons. How would the child of divorced parents or a single mother feel? For the many students in my daughter's school who self-identify as gay, or the countless who are raised by a single parent, I wondered just what effect this might have on their life and sense of self worth.
The content of these programs is often driven not by the desire to protect and educate young people, but to surreptitiously promote a certain set of religious beliefs. In my case, the organization doing the promotion is the Pregnancy Care of Cincinnati Ministries. Their abstinence-only-until-marriage program utilizes worksheets, games, videos, and trainings from similarly aligned group: Heritage Community Services. A review of this South Carolina-based organization's curriculum by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) found that it relies on messages of fear and shame and promotes biased views of gender, marriage, and pregnancy options. As an example, one lesson instructs young women that they "have a responsibility to wear modest clothing that doesn't invite lustful thoughts" while implying that young men cannot control their own sexual behavior.
Programs like this, that foster myths and stereotypes, should have no place in our schools.
We need fact-based education that protects all students regardless of the choices they or their parents have made. Forcing an agenda that aligns with a particular moral code of conduct--specifically one that aligns with the far-right wing of the Christian church and ignores the diversity of religion, culture, sexual orientation, and race--is totally unacceptable.
The second reason that parents should be concerned about my fight is that I have become all too familiar with the phrase "you can't fight city hall." I have found that the established institutions--in this case the district administration and school board--will fight with every ounce of their breath to prevent full, truthful disclosure and the right of a parent to participate in her child's education. This was evident during the meeting with my curriculum board and the three members of Pregnancy Care of Cincinnati Ministries who apparently were invited to convince me that we should teach kids that sex should only be engaged in within the boundaries of marriage. I felt that my input was not taken seriously, and that I was included not as a parent with a valued opinion, but simply in order to placate me.
Since the beginning of this ordeal, I have made 52 phone calls, researched for countless hours, spoken to over 30 students in my school district, and attended the curriculum board meeting at the board of education. I have made a request for the curriculum used in my daughter's school, but the district's superintendent says he can't give it to me because it is copyrighted. Pregnancy Care of Cincinnati Ministries has also told me they are consulting with their attorney about my request and will get back with me in a few days. Copyright or not, I certainly have the same right to see this curriculum as I would to see a copy of my daughter's math book.
I have done all of this in an attempt to get someone to listen, to usher in change regarding sex education on the part of my local school district. My attempts have fallen on deaf ears.
Originally published on RHrealitycheck.org
By Tami Sanderson, former reporter and mother of a 13-year-old girl in middle school in Loveland, Ohio