Who could’ve seen this coming? When you don’t teach kids about safe sex, they tend to have sex anyway, minus the safe part:
The superintendent of schools in Crane, Texas is rethinking the districts sexual education curriculum, after learning that 20 of the high schools 300 students have tested positive for chlamydia.
Jim Rummage told television station KFOR, "We do have an abstinence curriculum, and that evidently ain’t working. We need to do all we can, although it’s the parents’ responsibility to educate their kids on sexual education.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention isn't mincing any words, calling the outbreak a health issue of epidemic proportions.
Abstinence-only programs have been an enormous failure, despite heavy funding from the George W. Bush administration and conservative legislatures:
Abstinence-only-until-marriage programs don't work.
To date, 11 states have evaluated the impact of their abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. None has been shown to reduce teen sexual activity.
Virginity pledgers have found "loopholes" to keep their pledges intact—engaging in risky oral or anal sex—and neglecting to use condoms when they do begin to have vaginal intercourse, according to research from Peter Bearman at Columbia University.
A 2007 federally-funded evaluation of these programs found that youth in the control group were no more likely to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having sex, had a similar number of partners and had initiated sex at the same age.
It’s time for Texas schools to put their children first and restore sex ed classes to their public schools. After all, reducing STDs rates and teen pregnancy rates isn’t just the right thing to do for their overall health, it is the fiscally-conservative thing to do as well.