As Fort Worth ISD looks for a curriculum, what does effective sex education look like?
The Fort Worth Independent School District has been without sex education instruction for 10 months after district officials scrapped plans to adopt a new health curriculum.
As the district continues to look for a replacement, a national expert in sexual education says the most effective instruction gives students a more holistic understanding about healthy relationships — and also goes well beyond what Texas allows school districts to offer.
“It’s so much broader than just not having sex and not getting pregnant,” said Eva Goldfarb, a professor of public health at Montclair State University.
Fort Worth ISD drops HealthSmart curriculum after pushback
Fort Worth ISD isn’t offering sex education instruction for the school year after Superintendent Angélica Ramsey announced the district had dropped a health curriculum from HealthSmart, a company based in the Santa Cruz, California, area. The move came after parents pushed back on plans to start the program, saying that the board’s process for adopting the curriculum lacked transparency.
Some parents and others also took issue with the inclusion of information about sexual orientation and gender identity in the curriculum. During a school board meeting in January, Caleb Backholm, a student at Southwestern Theological Seminary and candidate at the time for the Fort Worth City Council, was one of more than two dozen speakers who called on the district to drop the curriculum. Backholm argued that human beings’ bodies and souls are inseparably linked, and one can’t have a different identity than the other.
“The sex of your body is your gender, it is assigned by God and cannot change,” Backholm said. “Thus, there is no such thing as truly transgender. There is no such thing as non-binary.”
Another speaker, Valeria Nevárez, warned the board that parents would continue to speak at meetings until the district dropped the HealthSmart curriculum. Nevárez, who ran unsuccessfully for the board’s District 3 seat in May, said the curriculum sexualized children, and also said parents need better access to information about what their children are learning in school.
“If you sexualize our children, academics doesn’t really matter,” she said. “If you rob their innocence, what is academics?”
After scrapping the old curriculum, the board voted in August to convene the district’s School Health Advisory Council to find a human sexuality curriculum that complies with state standards. The council will hold its second meeting virtually on Monday evening. During the meeting, members will go over the council’s bylaws and discuss its communications plan, according to an agenda posted online.
Today's top stories:
→ Alcon Laboratories considers $100M expansion in Fort Worth
→ Will Rangers head to World Series after Game 6 blowout?
→ N. Texas woman's Halloween obsession costs $40,000
🚨Get free alerts when news breaks.
Texas sex education must emphasize abstinence
Texas doesn’t require school districts to teach sex education at all. School districts that decide to teach sex ed must use an opt-in model for participation, meaning students would get no sexual health instruction unless their parents give permission. New state standards adopted last year also require schools that teach sex ed to emphasize abstinence as the only completely effective way to prevent sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies, while also including information about anatomy, contraception and STD prevention, a combination advocates call abstinence-plus.
Goldfarb, the public health professor, said Texas has been a leader in abstinence-only sex education for decades. Not coincidentally, she said, the state is also a leader in teen pregnancies. While teen birth rates have declined both in Texas and nationwide for years, the state consistently ranks in the top 10, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2021, the most recent year for which data is available, the state saw 20.1 births per 1,000 females aged 15 to 19, the ninth highest rate in the country, the CDC reported. By comparison, New Hampshire had the lowest teen birth rate, with just 5.4 births per 1,000.
Texas isn’t an outlier, Goldfarb said — researchers have found a strong correlation between state sex ed standards that focus almost exclusively on abstinence and high rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Decades of research dating to the 1980s suggests that those policies don’t reduce risky sexual behaviors among teenagers, and in some cases might actually cause harm, she said.
“This is not a public health-based, science-based approach,” said Golfarb, who is a nationally recognized expert on sex education. “This is an ideologically based approach that has to do more with religious values and beliefs than it does with health.”
Effective sex ed starts early, focuses on healthy relationships
That being said, Goldfarb said reducing teen pregnancy rates and STDs shouldn’t be the program’s only goals. While those are worthwhile goals, she said a high-quality sex education program should be aimed at helping students grow into adults who can engage in healthy relationships, respect other people’s boundaries and expect other people to respect their own.
Reaching that goal means starting much earlier than most sex education programs do now, Goldfarb said. Schools need to teach students the basic foundational elements of sex education in elementary school, she said.
The idea of teaching elementary-aged students about sex may give some parents pause, she said, but the early concepts students need to understand aren’t directly about sex. Just like in math or reading, students learn the building blocks of those concepts in early grades, then build on them later, she said. Conversations about consent in elementary classrooms can take the form of discussions about why everyone gets to decide who touches them, why students need to ask before borrowing a classmate’s crayons or how to treat others with dignity and respect, she said.
Parents and others who oppose school-based sex education often accuse school leaders of trying to sexualize children. But Goldfarb said a good sex education curriculum does the opposite. Kids who understand what healthy relationships look like are less vulnerable to being exploited, she said, because they’re better equipped to recognize and report inappropriate behavior from an adult if it happens.
“A young person who knows the names for their body parts is less likely to be sexually abused than someone who doesn’t,” she said.
An effective sex education curriculum should also include LGBTQ+ students, Goldfarb said. Historically, those students have been left out of sex education instruction, she said, and many have said they checked out during those classes because they didn’t feel the lessons applied to them. Some also said the fact that they were excluded from those curricula left them feeling marginalized.
Including those students in sex education curricula can have benefits that extend to everyone at school, Goldfarb said. Goldfarb and a colleague worked on a study that concluded that schools that use LGBTQ+ inclusive sex education curriculum saw less sexual harassment and bullying, and students at those schools reported feeling safer and better able to learn.
Evaluating whether any one sex ed curriculum is more effective than another is hard to do, Goldfarb said, because it depends so heavily on what states and districts want to get out of the curriculum. If they’re only concerned about lowering rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, a curriculum focused on risk reduction might be the best option. If they’re looking at the issue more holistically, something more comprehensive might be preferable. The problem, she said, is that neither of those options would comply with Texas’ abstinence-focused state standards.
“Whether you’re talking about just the pregnancy and STD prevention, or the more holistic model… teaching abstinence-only doesn’t do either of those things,” she said. “So it just doesn’t work.”
