Let’s talk about sex

Westbrook parents have a good reason to care about what local schools are or are not teaching about sex: The city has the highest teen pregnancy rate of any community in Cumberland County.

That’s why the proposed revisions to Westbrook’s health curriculum the School Committee is now considering are particularly important. A couple weeks ago, Sandy Hale, Westbrook’s school health coordinator, brought the committee a list of topics to be included in the curriculum for the junior high and high schools.

At least one parent is concerned that the list for the junior high includes contraception – something that hasn’t been taught at that level in Westbrook in recent years – and has convinced the Westbrook School Committee to hold a public hearing on the subject. Parents should attend this public hearing, which has yet to be scheduled, to let the School Committee know what their values are how those should be reflected in the curriculum.

Because Westbrook has such a high teen pregnancy rate and because we live in a society that sends children and teenagers messages about sex all the time, teenagers – even young ones at the junior high – need to have access to information about contraception. For many of these teens, school will be the only place they will get it, other than from their friends, who are an unreliable source for accurate information at that age.

Schools do not have to make it a required part of the curriculum. Parents who are opposed to that portion of the curriculum should be allowed to remove their children from that portion of health class.

Teaching abstinence should still be a much larger part of the curriculum. Teaching abstinence has proven to be an effective way to lower rates of sexual activity and pregnancy in teenagers. It is also consistent with the values of most parents.

However, teaching abstinence alone, as the schools do at the junior high, doesn’t seem to be working, because, as teen pregnancy rates around the state have dropped, Westbrook’s teen pregnancy rate has been increasing, according to statistics the American Journal reported last year.

Westbrook has surpassed Portland, which used to have the highest teen pregnancy rate in Cumberland County. Between 1993 and 1997, Westbrook had a rate of 62.2 pregnancies for every 1,000 women age 15 to 19, compared to a rate of 86.3 pregnancies per 1,000 women of that age in Portland. Between the years 1998 and 2002, the rate in Portland dropped to 55 per 1,000, while the rate in Westbrook rose to 70.8.

Westbrook’s rate is much higher than all of the other communities in Cumberland County. The only other community that even comes close is South Portland, with a rate of 44.8 per 1,000 women between those same ages.

It’s difficult to know why Westbrook’s rate is so high because there can be so many contributing factors. It’s certainly not entirely because of the way sex education is taught in the schools. A teenage mother we interviewed for our story last year, Stefanie Frank, said she learned about contraception in school, but that didn’t stop her from having unsafe sex.

Some parents might argue that providing information on contraception while teaching abstinence would send a mixed message to teenagers. However, teenagers already get a mixed message from the culture around them. Movies, television shows and commercials send implicit and explicit messages about sex all the time. The clothing worn by teenagers seems to get more revealing all the time.

What parents and educators need to do is, rather than ignore those messages, confront teenagers with frank talk about sexuality and how it’s reflected in community values. Parents, teachers and church leaders all have opportunities to talk to children and help them make healthy choices.

Brendan Moran, editor

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