CCSD invites community to talk about sex education

The Clark County School Board, a year after parents balked at proposed changes to its sex education policies, again will try to strike a balance between limiting what students learn about sex and providing full disclosure of today's sexual spectrum.

District officials have abstained from discussing the issue since last fall, when a series of closed-door meetings to gather feedback on a new sex education curriculum shocked and infuriated many parents.

The public outcry convinced a majority of the Clark County School Board to reject even the idea of revisiting the controversial topic, angering one trustee who has made modernizing sex education her top priority.

After months of delays, however, the board will host a town hall at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Las Vegas Academy, 315 S. Seventh St., to gauge the community's appetite for adapting the current abstinence-based curriculum to reflect more about sexual behavior, identity and orientation or allowing parents to control that conversation at home.

"No one really has to be a loser here," District E Trustee Patrice Tew said last week.

At a meeting of the board's sex education advisory committee, Tew pitched an idea that she hopes provides a compromise between advocates of a more comprehensive curriculum — one that includes information on homosexuality, gender nonconformity, new methods of birth control and more — and parents who don't want their children exposed to such sensitive information in the classroom.

She proposed a common set of age-appropriate lessons for all students, while offering an optional roster of courses, online, in a separate classroom or otherwise, for students with permission to access the additional information.

Emphasizing parental rights, Tew said this "menu" of sex education curriculum would acknowledge that rural communities such as Moapa, where the high school population is nearly 80 percent white, don't "mirror" other parts of Clark County.

"We have the inner-city ministers, the black ministers who say, 'You know what, quite frankly, some of this stuff isn't taught early enough for our community,'" Tew said.

"But what happens there doesn't necessarily need to be showcased to Moapa youth."

'Healthy and safe'

That argument baffled Sara Lemma, a parent member of the sex education advisory committee, or SEAC.

She compared Tew's approach to teaching Moapa youth only addition while saving multiplication and fractions for students in other valley cities.

"I mean, all of our kids are eventually going to have experiences outside of whatever it is they are taught in CCSD," Lemma said. "Our job is to give them the tools to keep themselves healthy and safe.

"They can't do that if we only give them a portion of the information," she added.

Lemma works for the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, which two years ago started a statewide review of sex education materials in each of the 17 school districts in Nevada.

In Clark County, the organization found a curriculum "rife" with what it considered outdated and misleading material, including suggestions that urinating after sex can prevent pregnancy.

Teen pregnancy is especially high in Nevada, where the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported a teen birth rate of 30.3 births per 1,000 females aged 15 and 19. That's well above the national rate of 26.5 births per 1,000 females aged 15 to 19, though the state rate plummeted 59 percent between 1991 and 2013.

The district has since removed a majority of the material flagged by the ACLU, but Lemma wants the school board to approve a policy requiring SEAC to conduct an annual review of sex education materials to check for accuracy and relevancy.

She proposed many other revisions to the existing sex education policies, including allowing the 10-member SEAC to develop curriculum, with implementation before the 2016-17 school year.

Other SEAC members, however, were not very receptive to Lemma's ideas.

"I really don't want to rush to get anything in place for the next school year," said parent member Michelene Newman, who described Tew's idea as "phenomenal."

Considering any changes that may come, Newman also threw her support behind another controversial topic that the board will address at Tuesday's meeting.

Opt in or opt out

Only three states — Nevada, Mississippi and Utah — require parental consent before a student can participate in sex education, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

While that "opt-in" policy rests in the hands of state lawmakers, the school board could consider lobbying for a switch to opt-out, where students automatically take sex education unless their parents say otherwise.

The ACLU recently analyzed opt-in records from the district and found, during the 2013-14 school year and fall semester in 2014, about 91 percent of all high school students returned a permission slip to participate in sex education.

Less than 1 percent of students actively opted out, while the remaining 8 percent simply never returned the form.

District officials plan to present their own analysis of opt-in records at the Tuesday meeting, but Tew said the policy helps strengthen parent involvement.

"It seems ironic there would be a push for opt-out which basically says, 'We'll teach your kids with or without parent notice,'" Tew said. "For me, it's a premature attempt to make the board make a decision two years before the (Nevada) Legislature even convenes."

Although changing the opt-in policy may not be a local decision, the sex education curriculum is up for debate and parents like Lemma consistently have urged the board to adopt what they describe as "age-appropriate, medically accurate and evidence-based" teaching materials.

They also call for the elimination of "fear-based" materials that may alienate students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning.

Other parents, including several from Moapa, questioned what risk such a curriculum would place on their children.

"Getting rid of fear-based curriculum ... does that equal not teaching the scary, hard facts about how unhealthy the average male homosexual lifestyle is?" asked mother Wendy Mulcock. "Is that considered fear-based?

"Think about that, because it is dangerous."

Contact Neal Morton at nmorton@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0279. Find him on Twitter: @nealtmorton