Tennessee: "Abstinence First" OK for Area's Sex Ed

Insiders say local Tennessee school districts are unlikely to follow the example of the school board in Portland, Maine, which recently voted to make a variety of contraceptives available to middle schoolers.

Shelby County and Memphis school districts have promoted an abstinence-based curriculum for more than two decades, educators say. "We don't discuss any more or less than the state guidelines," said Thomasena Stuckett, Shelby County's science curriculum specialist.

Neither district has ever made condoms nor any other birth control product available to students in any grade. Tennessee mandates teaching the Family Life Curriculum, which deals with puberty and HIV/AIDS. County schools spend one week on the program, while city schools spend six. "We don't even discuss contraceptives," Stuckett said, and sex itself is rarely, if ever, mentioned in the county lessons.

Each district has the option of expanding what is included in the instruction. The city district uses an abstinence-plus curriculum in which sex and contraception are discussed with high school students, said Carol Irwin. "It's really hard to get everyone on the same page about this, especially in the Bible Belt," said the former health curriculum coordinator with Memphis schools.

The 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found more than half of Tennessee high school students reported having had sex. Nearly 8 percent had lost their virginity before turning 13. Condom use was reported by 60 percent of sexually active high school students. A survey of Memphis students in 2005 found more than two-thirds of high school students and almost 40 percent of middle school students had had sex. Memphis had the nation's second-highest rate of teen births in 2003, and Shelby County had the state's highest number of teen births in 2005.

While the Maine district's decision to provide contraceptives attracted much attention, it is not alone in doing so. About one in four of the 1,700 school-based health centers in the United States distribute prescription contraception, said Divya Mohan, spokesperson for the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care.

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