Mara Gordon | Sex ed: an hour doesn't cut it

They just seemed too young.

Too young to be pregnant, too young to be worrying about HIV, too young to be making the kinds of choices they were making. It sounds like a cliche, or a tool of the right wing to illustrate the decline of American morality.

But, to me, they're just kids who are falling through the cracks of Philadelphia's inconsistent sex-education policy.

I was teaching a group of high-school students about birth control and sexually transmitted diseases last week, part of an outreach program at Planned Parenthood I've worked with for a few months.

Organizations like Wes Health Systems the community health center in North Philadelphia where I taught last week - ask for volunteers to come in and speak to youth groups and classes; we show up and do what we can.

Usually, that's not much.

I get an hour or so to try and teach them the comprehensive sex education they didn't get in middle school.

That's an hour for condoms, for the pill, for HIV and for syphilis. That's also an hour for issues like "How do I know if I have AIDS?" and "You can't get pregnant the first time you have sex, right?"

It's basically one short hour for the kinds of big questions that take a lot longer than that to answer.

The problem is, these teenagers have usually figured out the birds and the bees before I - or any other sex-education teacher - show up.

They're definitely having sex. They just don't know how to do it safely.

It's not a new story. Soaring teen pregnancy rates all over the country. Patchwork sex-education programs, with problems ranging from the dreaded abstinence-only policy to shortages of qualified teachers. STDs galore.

But that story becomes very real to me every time I talked to kids like the ones I taught last week.

Take one soft-spoken young man in the class, who was a foot taller than me but whose anxious demeanor gave away his age: sixteen.

When I asked the class to write any questions they had on small scraps of paper, most of his peers jotted down smart-alecky responses. His question, however, was serious. He wanted to know if his girlfriend could get pregnant if she skipped her birth control pills. He had no idea how they worked, and he had no idea if she were taking them correctly.

In other words, he was sexually active - but he was missing large pieces of information he should have already gotten in middle-school sex ed.

My supervisor at Planned Parenthood, Jennifer Pennington, said she's encountered a million stories like this one teaching health-education classes to Philadelphia youth.

"You could walk into a classroom and you've got such a range of knowledge, it's kind of challenging to address it all," said Pennington, who runs the organization's education programs. "I would really like them to have some kind of age-appropriate sexuality education in every grade."

These knowledge gaps aren't just restricted to the North Philadelphia community where I spoke to this young man and his classmates. It's a problem across the city, according to Pennington, because there's no policy that requires consistent health education in every school.

And this means big problems for Philadelphia. In 2004, almost 16 percent of women giving birth in the city were teenagers. That's almost 50 percent higher than the nation-wide rate.

And it's embarrassingly high considering that the Philadelphia school district isn't embattled in the pointless abstinence-only sex education debates that plague the rest of the country.

Theoretically, Philadelphia schools embrace education about contraception and safe sex. Programs like the one I volunteer for shouldn't even need to exist, because according to state and city standards, kids should be getting this in public schools.

But the way that schools actually meet those standards is haphazard. Individual principals and teachers teach sex education as they see fit and aren't held accountable for how they do it.

There's no good reason why Philadelphia students aren't getting high quality sex education. But the kind of education they deserve will happen only if the Philadelphia school board lives up to its own standards.

Mara Gordon is a College senior from Washington, D.C. Her e-mail is gordon@dailypennsylvanian.com. Flash Gordon appears on Thursdays.

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