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Learn ways to counteract the trend of adopting harmful, free-sex philosophies by persuading your school board to adopt an abstinence-until-marriage curriculum.

Behind parents’ backs, public schools are propagating the harmful, free-sex philosophies of Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey to children. Help counteract that trend by persuading your school board to adopt an abstinence-until-marriage curriculum.

1. Learn The Law

At least 30 states have laws requiring taxpayer-funded sex education to include an abstinence message.  To check if your state has one, visit www.teen-aid.org/State_ Resources .htm.

Federal Title V grants—which fund hundreds of the nation’s sex-education programs— also require recipients to emphasize abstinence (www.choosingthebest.org/fund ing_grants). To find out if those guidelines apply to your district, call your state health department and ask to speak to the Title V abstinence coordinator (every state should have one except California).

2. Check For Compliance

Now that you know the law, hold your school district accountable. Sarah Harden of Wake
County, N.C.— who successfully led an effort to get a countywide abstinence-education policy—recommends that parents:

Recruit family friendly school board members or teachers to help you obtain and review existing sex-education curricula to see if it’s in compliance.

Ask for supplemental materials, such as teacher guidebooks or videos, that may reveal hidden agendas. Harden discovered one guidebook, for instance, that suggested teachers “downplay the failure rate of condoms,” she says. “We found that many of these supplemental materials were hidden under Trojan horse subjects such as “violence protection” or “discrimination and
harassment.”

Look for buzz words that reveal whether the district uses a Kinsey-style or abstinence-until-marriage model, adds Joneen Krauth, executive director of the Denver-based Wait Training, an international abstinence-education center. For instance, do curricula guidelines mention “condoms” and “risk reduction” or “abstinence” and
“prevention”?  For more curricula-evaluation tips, visit www.waittrain ing.com

3. Create A Committee

Form a coalition of local parents, business owners, educators, medical professionals, clergy, legislators and even youth. “Having a cross-section of the community prevents the school board from dismissing you as a narrow interest group,” says Linda Klepacki, manager of Focus on the Family’s abstinence department. Committee members should:

• Collect petition signatures. Harden’s 30-member task force collected 4,000 petition signatures in 10 days. Even if some schools aren’t accountable to abstinence laws, “the greater the number of voters saying the same thing, the more the board has to listen,” she says.
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• Select at least three abstinence curricula to present to board members as “community-approved” options. “That way you are giving the board choices, rather than just telling it
• what to do,” Klepacki says. When selecting curricula, use guidelines from the Abstinence Clearinghouse (www.abstinence.net), which only recommends “100 percent wait-until-marriage programs,” she says.
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• Provide funding to preempt lack of money from being used as an excuse to block abstinence programs. Local businesses, for instance, can “sponsor teacher trainings or purchase books for the school,” suggests Dr. Coleen Kelly Mast, author of Sex Respect (www. sexrespect.com).

4.  Address The School Board

Opponents will try to paint abstinence programs as “religious right” propaganda, Klepacki
warns, so emphasize data, not ideology.

For instance, Harden presented her board with data showing that three years of abstinence programs coincided with Wake County’s first reduction in STDs and teen pregnancy rates in 20 years. To obtain that data, contact her at sarahh1958@aol.com Remember your rights, says activist Sarah Harden, to access public information.  In taxpayer-funded schools, “it’s almost all public except things like personnel or student files.”

(This article originally appeared in Citizen Magazine, Volume 18, Number 12, December 2004 and has been reprinted with permission from the editor)