Sex Ed Weekend Round-Up: Kentucky, Michigan, South Dakota, Texas, and more...

Kentucky: A local paper notes that parents in northern Kentucky (Boone, Campbell, Grant and Kenton counties) can now pick up tool kits from the Northern Kentucky Abstinence and Character Team to help talk with their children about sex. The Abstinence and Character Team is a community coalition that encourages abstinence until marriage.Michigan: The Voice reports that the Macomb County Abstinence Partnership was brought in by the Anchor Bay School District to ensure that the school was meeting state reproductive health curriculum standards. Tests given to middle and high school students show a better understanding that abstinence is the only 100 percent effective way to avoid HIV/AIDS and pregnancy; however, the article does not address whether teens have any understanding of how to protect themselves from STDs and pregnancy if they do decide to become sexually active. A survey will be sent home to parents during the upcoming school year to provide feedback on how to improve the program.South Dakota: A letter-to-the-editor in the Argus Leader calls on the Sioux Falls School Board to include information about homosexuality in its sex ed curriculum, saying that such information is important for all youth not just LGBTQ students.Texas: CNN reports on a new study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology that sex education may encourage teens to delay sex. The study focuses on a curriculum designed by doctors at Texas A&M and used in Temple, TX. The study only tracked students responses on surveys about whether they would delay sex, and not whether they actually did.An editorial in The New York Times examines the problems that young Latina women face including motherhood at a young age. The editorial reminds me of the situation in the Bronx that I wrote about last month, where young girls there had to advocated for comprehensive sex ed.Alternet has an article on a group called the Medical Institute for Sexual Health (MISH) and a grant it received from the federal government to develop a sexual health curriculum for medical students. The article says MISH provides abstinence-only-until-marriage materials that focus on using scare tactics to persuade teens not to have sex, and notes that past MISH presentations have been criticized for using misleading data about the effectiveness of condoms.