The Next Step in Ensuring Quality Sex Education for Students

The Next Step in Ensuring Quality Sex Education for Students

By Agripino Kennedy
Legal Intern, Victim Rights Law Center

Last year, Attorney Katrina Eberly wrote an amazing blog post praising the incredible guidelines for sex and health education published by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). While the guidelines themselves are phenomenal, more can be done to ensure that adherence to the guidelines’ standards is guaranteed – and thus ensure higher quality sexual education for students in Massachusetts. The DESE guidelines are administrative in nature, meaning that they are not binding, but rather – suggested guidelines to follow, and could be altered with a change in administration. To secure the foundation of high-quality sexual education, it is crucial to codify those standards into law. Currently, advocates of high-quality sexual education are aiming to do just that through pushing for the passing of the Healthy Youth Act (SD. 2694, HD. 3874).

The guidelines established a standard for schools that requires any sex-ed curricula be LGBT inclusive, comprehensive, medically accurate, age appropriate, and cover consent. The Healthy Youth Act (HYA) aims to codify those standards to ensure them for future generations through legislative action, rather than a reliance upon an administrative body to maintain them even with a change in leadership.

The HYA mandates that DESE must update the guidelines every 10 years to keep them up to date with current medical and scientific understandings of sexual health and safety. The HYA also acts to set a minimum standard of quality, codifying DESE’s guidelines as a bottom bar of standards to be met. Schools can still opt out entirely from teaching Sex-Ed, as can individual families from participation in it, but the standards ensure that – like other subjects – anything being taught to our children is of a quality and comprehensive nature. While the DESE guidelines are phenomenal in the goals they set, without legislative action they leave open the potential for harmful and inaccurate information to be brought into our schools’ sex-ed curricula.

The HYA would also require mandated data collection and reporting from schools on what is being taught in sex-ed. This is no different from the required data collection in core subject areas, such as mathematics, to improve student learning and outcomes. By mandating regular data collection, DESE will be provided with an accurate picture of what is going on in classrooms and be better able to support schools and school districts in complying with the standards when they need more support. It would provide a clear roadmap for implementation of the standards in every school offering sex-ed curricula, according to the data detailing where schools need more support.

Sex-ed is a crucial part of the work to end sexual violence. By educating our students on concepts like safety in relationships, consent, bodily autonomy, and boundaries, we are preparing them to engage in relationships of all kinds in a healthier way. Further, we are teaching them how to not only avoid unsafe behaviors themselves but recognize it in others. Doing so creates the opportunity for them to avoid unsafe behaviors or seek help when they need it. 

The HYA has passed in the Senate five times in previous years but continues to go without a vote in the House of Representatives. As a result, a new school year is starting without the HYA to bolster compliance with the DESE framework. In conversations with the HYA Coalition in preparation for this post, they expressed great thanks to the Senate for its continued support of quality Sex-Ed in our schools and calls upon constituents and interested organizations to join in advocating to their state representatives the importance of the HYA. For more information on the HYA and what it entails, as well as how to get more involved in the advocacy movement, please visit the HYA Coalition’s website at https://www.healthyyouthact.org/.

Agripino Kennedy is a 3L at New England Law | Boston interested in public interest lawyering, and a survivor of the Florida public schools system who is hopeful for higher quality education for students of the present and future everywhere.