School system slowly revising health and sex education curriculum

Thursday, March 9, 2006

School officials, who began revising the county’s sex education curriculum last summer, say they have updated the course for sixth grade and hope to have courses for other middle school grades finished before fall.

The health and sex education curriculum for high schools should be revamped in the next 12 months, said Betsy Gallum, supervisor of health education.

‘‘We’re revising everything to be in compliance with state standards,” said Gallum. ‘‘It was a long time since the curriculum had been revised.”

Patricia Miller, director of Curriculum and Instruction, said the county was not under any deadline pressure to revise the curriculum but was ‘‘committed to making sure our curriculum was aligned with the state’s.”The program for sixth graders concentrates on building healthy relationships with friends and family as well as building self-esteem.

The new curriculum focuses on activities that allow students to demonstrate what they’ve learned rather than simply have a teacher convey information.

‘‘It’s a wellness curriculum for children,” Gallum said. ‘‘We ask them how they would make the healthiest decision in this case. That’s probably something we wouldn’t have done 10 years ago.”

Officials say the high school curriculum will also teach about homosexuality and bisexuality, as it has in the past.

The Gazette reported that the county had been teaching about homosexuality years before neighboring Montgomery County placed the subjects in its curriculum. The Montgomery curriculum caused an immediate outcry from conservatives because it claimed those who opposed homosexuality were bigoted and intolerant.

Protests quickly led to a court injunction that banned the curriculum until it was revised to allow other points of view on homosexuality.

Pat Miller, director of curriculum and instruction, said the problems in Montgomery County were instructive.

‘‘We wanted to include our constituent groups,” Miller said. ‘‘We read about what was going on in the other jurisdiction, and we wanted to be careful and thoughtful. We wanted to be aware that what we were doing is aligned [within state law] for health.”

E-mail Guy Leonard at gleonard@gazette.net