Associated Press - Tuesday September 26, 2000
Deborah Zabarenko

"Parents, simply put, want it all," said Tina Hoff of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which performed the sex education study.

"They're looking at sex education to tell their children to wait to have sex but they also want it to provide information about how to get birth control, how to talk about it, as well as more controversial issues that schools sometimes shy away from, like abortion and sexual orientation," Hoff said at a briefing.

The study also found so-called abstinence sex education -- where most U.S. federal involvement over the past two decades has been focused -- is not really that different from programs that offer information about homosexuality, abortion and birth control devices.

Most "abstinence-based" or "abstinence-focused" sex education programs offer information on the basics of sexuality, but the emphasis was still on waiting until marriage before having sex, Hoff said.

However, 85 percent of the parents surveyed said teenagers should be taught in junior and senior high school how to use condoms, and 84 percent said other forms of birth control should be taught as well.

The vast majority of parents, 94 percent, also said they wanted schools to address such issues as the pressure to have sex and the emotional consequences of becoming sexually active.

But there were often gaps between what parents wanted and what schools teach on such subjects as what to do if raped, how to talk to parents, homosexuality, how to use and where to get birth control, abortion and how to deal with pressure to have sex, the survey found.

For example, 76 percent of parents said they wanted their children to learn about sexual orientation and homosexuality, but only 41 percent of students said they were taught about those issues.

Students, for their part, said they needed to know more than they are being taught about what to do in cases of rape and sexual assault, how to get tested for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and how to talk to a partner about birth control and diseases, the study said.

Nearly half of the teachers surveyed, 47 percent, also felt too little time was devoted to such subjects.

Only "Abstinence Only"

But in a later panel discussion, Liz Alston, who heads the board of trustees of the Charleston County School District in South Carolina, said it was against her state's laws to teach anything except that there should be no sex outside marriage.

"We know that there are many things that should be taught, but in my state they decide that they are going to teach abstinence only," Alston said.

In the same discussion, sex educators from the Washington suburbs of Arlington, Virginia, and Silver Spring, Maryland, acknowledged there was little difference between Maryland's comprehensive program and Virginia's abstinence-focused approach. The main difference was that no contraceptive materials were allowed in the Arlington classrooms.

U.S. federal involvement in sex education has been focused primarily on abstinence programs, the foundation said, beginning in 1981 when Congress authorized $11 million to promote such programs.

The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta has provided funding since 1988 for education about HIV and AIDS, the foundation said.

As of 1999, 58 percent of secondary schools offered comprehensive sex education, 34 offered abstinence only and 8 percent offered some other program, according to the report.

Another report on sex education, released by the New York-based Alan Guttmacher Institute, reported that the increase in abstinence programs has meant a decline in teaching about birth control, abortion and how to get contraceptives and treatment for sexually transmitted disease.

"Our findings are particularly disheartening, considering that abstinence accounted for about one-quarter of the recent drop in the U.S. teenage pregnancy rate, while improved contraceptive use was responsible for the rest," institute President Sara Seims said in a statement.

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