![]() Sex ed curricula are recommended by councils made up primarily of parents and community members. In Texas, sex education typically takes up just a few hours of instruction a year in a handful of grades, and many school districts use outside groups and online providers rather than hiring experts in-house or training their own staff. “The best way to deal with that is at the beginning of the decision-making process.” “We deal with unexpected pregnancies,” said Jennifer Shelton, the executive director of Real Options, a pregnancy resource center in Allen, which has taught sex ed in more than a dozen public school districts. They say abstinence is the best, most effective way to prevent any risks associated with having sex and that they also teach students about healthy relationships and planning for their futures. Staff also say that their connections with schools grew out of a desire to teach young people how to avoid unplanned pregnancies in the first place, intervening before teens need their services. Staff of crisis pregnancy centers argue that their approach works: Their students report directly to them or in internal surveys that they’ve changed their minds about having sex. “We know very very well across many many health issues this is not what changes human behavior.” “You’ll tend to see that kind of overload on facts steer into fear,” said Leslie Kantor, chair of the Department of Urban-Global Public Health at the Rutgers School of Public Health, in New Jersey. Instead, they can cause students to stop absorbing information that might help them make informed decisions about sex in the future. According to public health experts, the approaches many of these groups take - such as emphasizing risks, inundating students with statistics and showing graphic pictures of STIs - aren’t effective in preventing or changing behavior. The growing school-based work of some centers comes despite scant evidence that the sex ed they provide helps reduce teen pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections. The money funds the groups’ overall work, not sex ed, but went to at least 14 of the centers identified by Hechinger as working in schools. ![]() In April, the Texas Legislature approved $165 million over two years for the organizations through its Alternatives to Abortion program (recently rebranded as Thriving Texas Families), more than double the 2019 budgeted amount. Wade last summer and the near-total ban on abortion in Texas, crisis pregnancy centers are poised to play an even bigger role going forward. A Hechinger Report investigation identified more than 35 examples of these centers involved in dozens of school districts across Texas, and the actual number is likely higher. But in Texas, which has among the most crisis pregnancy centers of any state and where state health standards dictate that sex education classes emphasize abstinence, those sex ed efforts are particularly widespread. Sex education has sometimes been a feature of their work. These groups, also known as pregnancy resource centers, began to sprout around the country in the late 1960s as states passed laws legalizing abortion. The organization is one of dozens of crisis pregnancy centers across the state that send employees into schools to talk to students and, in some cases, teach sex education classes. She works for the South Texas Pregnancy Care Center in Seguin, a group founded in 2001 to counsel women against getting abortions. Her curriculum for high schoolers, meanwhile, says that people who “go from sex partner to sex partner are causing their brains to mold and gel so that it eventually begins accepting that sexual pattern as normal.” This, the curriculum says, could “interfere with the development of the neurological circuits” needed for a long-term relationship.Īnderson isn’t a school district employee. They’re taught that condoms - while often labeled as a method for “safe sex” - do not keep them safe from pregnancy or sometimes-incurable sexually transmitted infections. The students are told that if they have sex before marriage, emotional risks include depression, guilt and anxiety. When Sarah Anderson travels to Texas middle schools to teach sex education, she brings props: a toy baby to represent unplanned pregnancy, a snake for bacterial infections, a pregnancy test for infertility, a skeleton for AIDS and cancer. Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
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