It was the first time sex ed was on a ballot.

BY CHARLOTTE WEST
NOVEMBER 19, 2020

One of the last things that Lilienne Shore Kilgore-Brown did during her senior year of high school before the pandemic was travel to Olympia, the capital of Washington, to advocate for state-wide comprehensive sex education.

“There are a lot of kids who aren’t getting the information they need,” she said. “They’re not getting that education about healthy relationships, or gender and sexuality, which just means that you have a group of people who simply because they had less education are less likely to be aware of their own bodily rights and autonomy.”

Shore Kilgore-Brown, now a first-year student at Columbia University, was part of a group of teens who visited local schools in her community in eastern Washington to provide peer-led sex education. In March, the Washington State legislature passed the legislation that Kilgore-Brown and her peers had advocated for.

The bill requires comprehensive sex education from kindergarten through 12th grade. Up until grade 3, students will participate in social emotional learning, which encourages skills like managing feelings and getting along with others, setting the groundwork for more relationship and sex-based learning in the future. There is no sexuality-based learning in those early grades. Opponents, who argued that the bill strips school boards of local autonomy and would teach children inappropriate content, quickly moved to overturn the legislation by getting enough signatures to put the issue on the November ballot. Last week, Washington voters supported the bill, with nearly 60% in favor of mandating comprehensive sex education in the state’s schools. This was the first time that a sex education mandate has appeared as a referendum on a statewide ballot.

Eva S. Goldfarb, a public health professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey, told Teen Vogue that polls and surveys have long shown that parents are supportive of comprehensive sex education. “What makes this so important is that now, it’s been put on a ballot and we have even more definitive proof because people weren’t just responding in general, but about their own children’s education,” she said. “And resoundingly they said yes.”

In addition to Washington, several other states including California, Oregon, Colorado and Maryland have comprehensive K-12 sex education, according to Elizabeth Nash, acting associate director for state issues at the Guttmacher Institute. Twenty-eight states and Washington, D.C. have implemented some form of sex and HIV education. Still, there’s no federal mandate requiring sex education, meaning it’s up to states to decide if or how they will teach it. That’s resulted in a patchwork landscape, under which students receive vastly different sex education depending on where they live.

In some states, sex education that stresses abstinence is required—an attitude that seems to have contributed to pushback against the Washington bill. Many worried that students would be taught material they weren’t ready for, Nicole K. McNichols, a psychology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, said. That’s a misconception. Reproduction won’t even be discussed until at least the fourth grade, she explained. (Parents have the right to opt their children out of sex education classes under the new mandate.)

McNichols said research shows that countries that do have comprehensive sex education curriculum, such as the Netherlands, have lower rates of unplanned pregnancies, lower rates of sexually transmitted infections, and that people, especially women, report having more positive first-time sexual experiences. The Washington law also requires LGBTQ inclusive education, something which many states that do have mandatory sex education don’t discuss, McNicols said.

Only 11 states and Washington, D.C. currently require inclusive content with regard to sexual orientation. On the other hand, six states require a positive focus on heterosexuality and/or negative focus on homosexuality, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Perhaps most important for those worried mandatory sex education would expose kids to content they are too young for, Goldfarb and a colleague, found in their recent examination of 30 years of sex ed research that it’s essential that kids start learning the basics early on. Just as young kids would learn how to count, add, and subtract before they start algebra, they also need to learn concepts such as how to have healthy relationships and setting boundaries. “That’s the foundation for later education on sexual consent, which is also part of the mandate,” she said.

Students who have been involved with advocating for the new curriculum agree. “When you get to the younger grades, it’s more just about privacy and body autonomy,” said Kellen Hoard, a 16-year-old junior at Inglemoor High School in Kenmore, Washington. “And that is something that that especially a lot of schools just don’t cover. And I think that will really set the foundation for when people are our age, and they’re starting to learn the stuff that’s more controversial.”

Hoard and Baeza Lakew, a 17-year-old senior at Kent Lake High School in Kent, Washington, are both members of the Washington State Legislative Youth Advisory Council. The council advises the Washington state legislature and also lobbies for issues that are of concern to the state’s students.

They helped push for the legislation earlier in the year with the goal of making sure that all kids in Washington had access to comprehensive sex ed. While some schools and districts had previously taught it, there were disparities between who was learning what. “I’ve talked with lots and lots of students who basically did not learn sexual education in school, anything they didn’t know was mostly from peers or from family,” Hoard said.

He has a vivid memory from a sex ed class in fourth grade: “One of the guys in the classroom asked, ‘How does someone get pregnant?’ And the teacher did not really know what to say. They just said, ‘Go ask your parents.’ That always stuck out to me.”

Lakew said it was important that the new curriculum emphasizes issues like consent and social and emotional learning for K-3.

Washington state Senator Claire Wilson, who was one of the main sponsors of the bill, said that testimonies from both high school and college students helped inform the push for the legislation. “We heard a consistent concern that students had confusing, difficult and damaging experiences in high school and even their college years that might have been easily avoided if they had had the benefit of the curriculum when they were younger, involving gender identity, unwanted pregnancies, and #MeToo experiences,” she said.

As for Shore Kilgore-Brown, she just voted for the first time — and was able to support the sex education legislation she had worked so hard to help get passed. “It was really cool to vote for something that I was a part of,” she said.

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/teens-washington-prop-90-sex-education-mandate