Sex ed has a long history in Bibb County

It is good to finally see a greater emphasis on sex education in the Bibb County public schools. It has been a long time coming. The statistics are clear, Bibb County’s teen pregnancy rate per 1,000 girls is 45.2. The state rate is 30.3 and the national rate is 26.5 per 1,000 girls.

The new program, Family Life and Sexual Health curriculum, or FLASH, will replace a helter skelter curriculum that was up to each individual health teacher focused mainly on abstinence. Teachers and administrators are to be commended for diving back into the pool and tackling this subject.

In 1993, recommendations from a state review committee that was formed the previous year made changes in the state’s sex education policy. One of the members of that committee was Bibb County school board member Susan Cable. She was also one of three dissenting members of the state committee who campaigned for a stronger emphasis on abstinence.

The state Board of Education, charged with carrying out the recommendations, required local school boards to implement advisory boards comprised of mainly parents to review instructional materials for the curriculum. Because of the sensitivities of the times, the state also gave local boards the latitude to adjust the curriculum in many ways. The state allowed the demonstration of contraceptive devices but the local policy did not. The state policy allowed for discussion of homosexuality, the local policy did not.

One of the most contentious issues involved parental rights. The state required opt-out, meaning a parent would have to specifically request their child be removed from the sex education classes, but in Bibb, the opposite was true. Parents were required to give written permission for their children in elementary school grades to participate but not those in middle and high school grades.

The advisory committee that reviewed the materials for the sex education curriculum was comprised of 18 members of the community nominated by each board member and the superintendent. The committee met for three months and it was a long back and forth debate that was sometimes contentious, but it didn’t end there. Once the materials were approved by the committee there were equally contentious board meetings, the first in May 1994, where some of the committee-approved materials were called into question.

In the end, the board would recommend accepting the committee’s recommendations, minus nine items, down from 18 items that were objected to. Still the curriculum had noted gaps. In 1994, HIV-AIDS was much more in the news. It was regarded, not as a manageable disease, but a death sentence. Even though the Medical Center had one of the most renowned HIV-AIDS experts in the world, Dr. Harold Katner, he could not deliver his message in Bibb’s public schools because it had not been approved.

That’s about where Bibb’s sex education efforts have been stuck since. The advisory committee was supposed to meet twice a year to review new materials. While that sort of schedule was unrealistic to begin with, as far as we have been able to ascertain, another advisory committee of parents to approve materials was never formed.

Now, 23 years later, the announcement that the school system is embarking on a new sex education curriculum hardly raises any comment other than — what took you so long? Why now? We’ve always known babies having babies is a big problem. Eighty percent of teen moms end up on welfare and usually don’t graduate from high school. Their children end up being born into a cycle of generational poverty. And while the new program will continue to stress abstinence, the reality is that almost half of teenagers, according to research, are sexually active. By providing teens more information and options that cycle has a better chance of being broken. That’s better for them and better for society.

This story was originally published August 18, 2016 at 9:04 PM with the headline "Sex ed has a long history in Bibb County."