February 6, 2008

Who’s Educating Sex Ed Teachers?

A recent survey of middle school and high school sex education teachers in Illinois has found that many do not give comprehensive instruction on abstinence, birth control, HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, Reuters Health/Yahoo News reports (news.yahoo.com, 2/5).  The findings also suggested that many of the teachers had received inadequate or no sex ed training whatsoever.

In the survey, which canvassed 335 sex ed teachers at Illinois schools, 30 percent of respondents said they’d received no training in sex education.

“Most parents support school-based sex education, and teens regard it as an important source of information,” researcher Dr. Stacy Tessler Lindau said in the article. “Yet we found that several important health topics and skills are omitted, more often than not, from most Illinois public school sex education criteria.”

Topics least discussed included information on how to use condoms or birth control, homosexuality and abortion.

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Previous Comments:

Passionatelover, Houston, 2008-02-09 16:35:10
Talking about sex is like talking about drugs, no one wants to admit they smoked weed in college and if U know anything about sex, U must have been promiscous. Its all about just say know and bury Ur head in the sand.

Glenn, Irvine, 2008-02-08 09:49:54
I cannot believe the amount of kids these days who don't know that HIV can be passed from unprotected sex, and adults who think the same way. One can only blame the parents AND the school systems for not teaching kids about this virus. When something breaks, you have to fix it. We all remember what that "sex ed" class was like --- lots of giggles, smirks and the like. When I attended junior high, it was the clap and syphilis that were the bad things to get; now, there's a lot more at stake.

Judith Backof, Fort Pierce, 2008-02-07 19:20:50
How can a person be a sex education teacher without any education (sometimes public school systems are totally brainless)? All I know is that in Broward County (FL) the School Board has a Health Education office that offers all Health and Science teachers in ALL grades free workshops on HIV/AIDS several times during each school year. Nothing is perfect, but Broward is doing a better job than almost everywhere else. Judi Backof (former resident of Broward)

Brad, Kansas City, 2008-02-07 09:55:44
It is very scary when the Missouri Governor kicked all the trained Planned Parenthood educators out of all Missouri Public Schools.