South Pike officials have chosen to teach an abstinence-only sex education curriculum beginning next school year.
The move puts the district in compliance with a new state law that says school districts must offer either an abstinence-only or “abstinence-plus” sex education curriculum.
South Pike Junior High School principal Joe Leavy and counselor Linda Wall made a presentation about newly acquired abstinence-only curriculum at the school board’s meeting earlier this month.
“Every school district in the state has to choose and adopt a district policy before July 2012 on either abstinence-only or either abstinence-plus,” Wall said. “Our district went with the abstinence-only.”
Wall said abstinence-only is “the state standard for any sex-related education taught in public schools.”
School districts that opt to offer an abstinence-plus curriculum, which includes information about contraceptives and sexually transmitted diseases that the abstinence-only curriculum does not have, are required to get school board approval.
Students must get parental permission to take sex education courses under the new law.
Wall wrote a grant request for the “Mine to Choose” curriculum, available through a program developed under the Building Healthy Families for the Future with the Mississippi Office of Healthy Schools.
The new state law requires schools to teach the curriculum but does not fund it.
Wall said the class will feature speakers and “real babies” — a computer program designed to make students aware of the care needed for infants.
“The ‘real babies’ are computerized and programmed to wake up through the night, and the babies tell the teacher if the baby was changed, fed, not fed, abused or neglected,” Wall said.
The abstinence-only curriculum requires boys and girls to be separated into different classes when sex-related education is discussed or taught.
It prohibits teaching abortion as a means of birth control or instruction on condom use.
School board president Dr. Luke Lampton, who also serves on the Mississippi Board of Health, said he believes the abstinence-only program shows some positive effects on teen pregnancy prevention.
“I think it is effective,” Lampton said. “The state law is supposed to pattern the desires of the district, and I think the district has chosen the curriculum that best matches the desires of the parents in our district.
“There’s a lot of different ways of teaching pregnancy and disease prevention, and abstinence-only education is an important part of educating students,” he said. “There are some scientific studies that reflect that there is a plus to the abstinence-only curriculum in preventing teen pregnancy.”
The new law, which took effect in July, followed previous unsuccessful attempts to introduce sex education in classrooms in Mississippi, which has the nation’s highest gonorrhea and chlamydia rates, and some of the highest teen pregnancy rates.
