Vermont Students Deserve Comprehensive Sex Ed
September is Sexual Health Awareness Month, and we're celebrating by bringing you this very special piece written by a local youth leader, Jasper/Jazz Morton (pronounfluid).
Jazz is a 16 year old junior at CVUHS and former Youth Organizer with the Education Justice Coalition.
Jazz is passionate about inclusive sex education for all, and wants teachers to help ensure all youth have access to quality information!
Here's what Jazz had to say:
Talking to teenagers is already difficult for most adults. But talking to teenagers about sexuality? Most adults would rather swallow raw eggs.
There’s no sugarcoating it; sex ed is a universally awkward class. Many adults’ instinct is to teach the basics of pregnancy and STD prevention, maybe put a condom on a vaguely phallic vegetable, and change the subject.
But this isn’t the real-world information youth deserve.
In order to improve sex ed, we have to understand where we are and how we reached this point. The United States was founded on Puritanical values that deemed sexuality, especially “deviant” sexuality, sinful and taboo. In many states, these attitudes are still reflected in laws on what students can learn about sex in health class.
Even regions that don’t ban talking about safe sex fall short due to a lack of knowledge and resources.
The only national guidelines for sex ed come from the CDC’s Health Education Curriculum Analysis Tool: a 902 page document on the CDC’s website with a header warning that it contains “gender ideology.” Its directives are vague, and it lacks any practical advice on how to actually handle The Talk.
Here in Vermont, sex ed curriculum is required to include instruction on abstinence - but not required to include instruction on consent. Vermont has no law regarding medically accurate instruction in sex ed classes, so it’s up to teachers to decide what information students get in class.
To complicate matters, health educators receive ridiculously little time to get information through to students. It’s no wonder that sex ed begins and ends with how to use a condom.
The problem is that, just like condoms, a healthy relationship with sexuality isn’t one-size-fits-all. Some people, like myself, are asexual and don’t want to have sex. Some people do, but aren’t sure what that looks like for them. Thousands of identities and experiences can affect someone’s idea of sexuality: not only LGBTQ+ identity, but also family structure, personal history, disability, and so much more. But current sex ed fails to acknowledge how many factors go into a person’s relationship with sex.
When we don’t provide information that fits while teens are in class, they will inevitably go to their friends or the internet to fill the void. Peer advice can be helpful if said peers are well-educated on the subject. But a friend group’s Keeper of Sexual Knowledge could just as easily be repeating dangerous and harmful myths, or getting their information from an AI chatbot that’s just reformatting Reddit’s hottest takes. It’s a lose-lose situation.
So, how do we ensure that youth have the information they need to explore their sexuality in a healthy way? This is where resources like Outright’s Teaching Inclusive Sex Ed Course come in.
The Teaching Inclusive Sex Ed Course includes:
- Inclusive curricula and resource recommendations
- Evidence-based best practices
- Practical frameworks
- Applicable laws
- Strategies for handling pushback
And it includes something you won’t find in other curriculum guides: the voices and perspectives of real Vermont youth on how sex ed could better meet our needs.
Students don’t need teachers to be omnipotent or perfect. We need them to recognize their knowledge gaps and do their best to account for them. Not only can outside resources help teachers overcome awkwardness and make their classes more comprehensive and culturally-competent, teachers can share reliable sources of information with students when a question can’t be answered in class.
Youth of every background and identity deserve applicable, comprehensive sex ed. And when teachers are willing to learn, their students prosper.