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whAT hAppened TO The Birds And The Bees?
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Sex education unit returns to UPA after three years
ARTICLE & PHOTOS BY APRIL NGUYEN • ILLUSTRATIONS BY ZAINAB SHAIKH • DESIGN BY AMANDA REBOREDO
Then eight grader Romita Pakrasi and her classmates believed they already knew everything about puberty, sex and everything else this play was trying to teach them since they were “all-knowing” pre-teens and teenagers. During the 2017-2018 school year, Kaiser Permanente Educational Theater’s production of “Nightmare on Puberty St.” paid a visit to UPA’s seventh and eighth grade students. When asked about it, Pakrasi laughed and faintly recalled filing into the gym as an eighth grader to see a huge stage set up. Although she had forgotten most of the play, she remembered a specific scene about a suicide hotline and number and “that’s about it.”
“Everyone just thought it was stupid and funny,” Pakrasi said. “No one was actually paying attention to anything they were saying. It really did not inform us at all, about anything relating to sex.”
Science teacher Elisheva Bailey, who teaches ninth grade biology and human body systems, joined the science department at the start of the 2020-2021 school year and brought with her the idea and dedication to teach a comprehensive sex education unit: Health Connected’s Teen Talk. This curriculum meets the requirements of the California Healthy Youth Act, teaching about sexual health and sexuality using gender inclusive language. It specif-
"We live in the 21st century; I feel like we don't have to focus on such a traditional paradigm because I think there's a lot more interesting ways to discuss sex." - Daniel Tarbet
ically covers sexual and reproductive anatomy, birth control options, STIs (including HIV), personal values, abstinence and refusal skills, developing and maintaining healthy relationships, decision-making and communication skills, improving family communication, sexual safety, consent and the law, gender, sexual identity, sexual orientation and sexuality in the media.
Bailey believes the sex education curriculum should be introduced during the second semester of freshman year, as incoming freshman lack a level of maturity and attentiveness for the first several months of the school year. Furthermore, the human body systems unit in the biology curriculum conveniently segues into sex education, and by late into the second semester, Bailey would have already established a connection with students to make the unit a more comfortable learning experience. “I absolutely anticipate giggling and lots of snickering, and I have to account for that,” Bailey said. “I’m just like, ‘Get it out,’ you know, ‘Go ahead and do it,’ It’s uncomfortable, especially when you’re having this information given to you by somebody who’s not your parent.” UPA closed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2019-2020 school year starting March 16, which is approximately a third of the way
into semester two. Since the sex education unit is better suited for the latter half of the semester, the class of 2023 was never taught the curriculum, as Bailey worked with the UPA administration to decide the content can be too personal and uncomfortable for virtual learning. For a similar reason, the class of 2024 also missed out on this unit in their full year of distance learning for the 2020-2021 school year. In the absence of this unit, the current sophomores and juniors have turned to other sources of information including parents, siblings and cousins, friends, online platforms including social media, TV shows and online sources. “I think a lot of people have misconstrued conceptions of how relationships are,” Bailey said. “They don’t know the law. They don’t know how to say no. They see things online, and they see things on TV, and they think that that’s how it is, how relationships are or how people interact with each other. It’s just not true; what’s on TV is fiction. What happens in real life is different, and people just don’t know. There’s just things that they don’t get.” However, the beauty in having all that information out there is that there is so much to explore that goes beyond the bounds of even the most comprehensive Science teacher Deana Arnold reads a scenario about a curriculums, especially for the topic of sexlesbian couple. She asked the seniors to stand up at any uality that has a widely undiscussed history point of her reading the story when they feel the rela- and nuanced psychological complexities.tionship becomes abusive. They collectively stood at the “There are a lot of other things I learned mention of one partner's possessiveness over the other. that were more interesting. For example, queer theory from Michel Foucault, or podcasts about unconventional relationships— the types of stuff I feel like we don’t get to learn a lot,” junior Daniel Tarbet said. “We live in the 21st century; I feel like we
don’t have to focus on such a traditional paradigm because I think there’s a lot more interesting ways to discuss sex. I remember Mrs. Bailey was planning to talk about transgenderism and stuff. I want to learn about that.”
According to Health Connected, an estimated two weeks of 11 sessions are recommended to effectively cover all the topics of the curriculum. However, the current plan included teaching a condensed version of Teen Talk only to seniors during seminar periods on March 31, April 5 and April 7. Working with science teachers Loren Schwinge and Deana Arnold, Bailey explained that the senior class was divided into three groups to be taught in three 60 minute periods each run by a different teacher. Each session will cover one of three topics—STIs and HIV, contraceptive and birth control options and healthy relationships—that Bailey and the other teachers believed to be the most essential topics of the entire curriculum.
“We decided we’re going to take three topics that we think are relevant because they’re graduating, and they’re going to college,” said Bailey. “We’re not gonna have time [to cover the entire curriculum]. If I were a mom, and I am, I had to pick [these three topics]. I had to narrow it down; I had to make the call.”
Previously, Schwinge taught biology to the freshman class, and embedded a unit on the teenage brain with information covering reproductive anatomy, safe sex and STDs. However, when former science teacher Christopher Lucas and current science teacher Vaishali Patil taught ninth grade biology, sex education was not included in the curriculum. This resulted in several cohorts of freshmen going about their high school careers lacking a formal sex education, including UPA’s current senior class. “A lot of us are already 18 and doing sex education now,” Pakrasi said. “It’s good that they’re doing it, but it’s really late.” Schwinge believes the missing curriculum was due to two factors: UPA’s shared space with a church and state requirements. Although UPA is not a religious school, in Schwinge’s experience, the expectations of the church and community of parents might have affected the presence of sex education. Moreover, the state of California did not require more than an education on HIV prevention for charter schools before 2019. For Schwinge to teach sexual health, she had to approach the UPA Board of Trustees. “The board did not allow me to teach sexuality to ninth graders, so I was able to only do so in AP Psychology because it’s literally A group of students works together to read descriptions of different sexually transmitted infections and match them to the correct name given on a separate worksheet.
Students follow along as Arnold demonstrates the proper use of a condom.
part of my curriculum, but that was still not received well with the original board,” Schwinge said. “And that’s different. Our board members are very different now.”
With an established curriculum and plan in motion, a comprehensive sex education is expected to be taught to both cohorts of seventh and ninth grade students by the end of this school year. However, Tarbet believes that freshman year is not the best time to teach this unit.
“I honestly think [as a] sophomore or junior, you have a higher level of being able to process the information you’re taking in and being able to have mature discussions about it with your classmates and your teachers,” Tarbet said.
In contrast, Schwinge thinks it is both appropriate and important to educate students in these grade levels.
“The more we make it normalized, the better it is because kids will have all the data they need to make the decisions that are best for them and to be aware of things that might happen in the future,” she said. “What I love about some of the junior high content is talking about toxic relationships and being pressured, and I wish someone had told me some of that stuff when I was younger.”
The version of Teen Talk designed for middle school includes all of the same topics as the high school version. Arnold explained that she plans to use collaborative worksheets to teach these topics and to assign questions to ask their parents to start the discussions at home, regardless of the comfortability. Bailey explained that for the high school curriculum, each topic includes an interactive activity that will allow the freshmen to actively participate and exchange information with each other. For example, to practice healthy relationships, the students will receive different scenarios to consider and act out that might challenge their ideas and knowledge about what a healthy relationship is. In addition, both teachers plan to anonymously collect at least one question or topic of interest from each student related to sexual health or sexuality at the end of each class period to answer or discuss the next day.
However, not all the seventh graders and freshmen will be receiving this engaging learning experience as two students’ parents have already made the decision to opt their children out of this unit. They will instead be given the material to read on their own and demonstrate participation and understanding in the form of an assignment. This passive learning plan will give students the opportunity to learn everything that is covered in the regular curriculum, but they will not experience active interactions with their peers.
On the other hand, some parents feel very strongly about ensuring their children have a comprehensive knowledge regarding sex and sexuality, such as Joe Felchlin, a UPA parent.
“For a lot of kids, their parents don’t want to talk about it with them, and the school does a very light treatment of [sex education],” Felchlin said. “I think that’s a disservice to our youth,” Felchlin said. “I wish that schools would have a frank discussion about sex and what it is and not in a context of religion or morality, but just what it is, the risks from disease and early pregnancy, what those consequences can be, etc.”
Ultimately, the science teachers, with the support of the administration and the board, want to educate students in order to give them, as young adults, the opportunity to make informed decisions in their lives beyond UPA.
“The core message is that everybody has questions, whether they want to admit it or not,” Bailey said. “The second thing is that people think that there’s something wrong with them because they think about it all the time, whatever it is, and I want to allay the fears that in most cases, whatever you’re doing or thinking or feeling is normal. That’s really, I think, the core of what I want to get across, and the curriculum lends itself to that, in addition to just making sure that they know what’s real and what isn’t real.”
