At New Haven’s Wilbur Cross High School, Martin Clark is known as “condom guy” or “Trojan.” Clark walks the halls with condoms on hand to distribute to his fellow classmates, or sometimes just New Haven residents who notice his Trojan hat. But this practice does not constitute a random act of safe-sex awareness—Clark is a part of the Planned Parenthood peer education program, Students Teaching about Responsible Sexuality (STARS). At his most recent STARS meeting, Clark asked his 19 fellow student safe-sex advocates what their sex education experiences have been like in school. “No one was getting any form of sex ed in high schools that wasn’t from an outside source,” he said he realized.
For the past 20 years, the New Haven Public School District (NHPS) has lacked a standardized health education program. In the ’90s, the district cut funding for their existing program, erasing sex-ed from the curriculum and phasing out health teachers. According to Julie Lowenstein, co-executive advisor of Yale’s Community Health Educators (CHE), these cuts were a consequence of resource allocation struggles in the underfunded public school system. “When school boards are on such a tight budget, they need to prioritize,” Lowenstein said.
Because health education is not federally mandated, it is one of the few programs that some public schools can scrap with budget cuts. Just 24 states mandate sex education. Connecticut is not one of these states, but it soon will be, according to Althea Brooks, DIV ’01, the Director of Coordinated School Health in New Haven. Brooks says that Connecticut’s State Department of Education’s mandate for a half credit of health education by graduation will take effect in school year 2021. In the meantime, the SDE has begun to advocate strongly for sex education as part of a high school curriculum, describing it as “an essential component of students’ physical, social and emotional development.”
In 2013, NHPS committed to the Michigan Model for Health—an expensive but highly-praised curriculum for K-12 health education, currently implemented in 39 states to varying degrees. “The Michigan Model for Health is the district’s inaugural implementation of an evidencebased, comprehensive, sequential health education curriculum,” says Brooks. “The Michigan Model for Health has been fully rolled out in our elementary and middle schools. The goal is to roll out high school this upcoming school year.” But while the struggle to fund training and fine-tune a schedule that will work for all of the district’s ten high schools plays out, New Haven high school students’ sole sex education is provided by groups of outside volunteers, or by a few teachers who have worked it into their curricula on an informal basis. Some students are getting health education from a Yale-based program.
In 1999, a guidance counselor from Wilbur Cross High School reached out to a Dwight Hall Public School intern because she wanted to make sure that Cross’s students received some sort of sexual health education. She sought a comprehensive health education curriculum but knew that NHPS didn’t have the curriculum or the capacity to teach it, said Katie Rich, Lowenstein’s counterpart and co-executive advisor of CHE. “This [Dwight Hall intern] along with some of her friends created a curriculum for high schools at first and expanded that program and created a separate curriculum for middle schools.” This group became CHE.
“[CHE] is a really great way to connect with New Haven,” said Lowenstein. “The students are really receptive and enthusiastic because it’s topics that they want and need to learn about. I always find that it’s a positive experience, the kids are really excited about learning and answering these questions that they’ve always had.” Through workshops at schools, CHE reaches out to 2,000 students a year—an impressive number but a small portion of the over 20,000 students enrolled in New Haven public schools.
Alondra Arguello, SY ‘17, who graduated from New Haven Academy in 2014, a relatively sexually active school according to Arguello, said that her high school sex education was minimal, maybe a week only one year. In the week long health education program that she did have, “We talked about different STDs, STIs, ways to transmit STIs. We talked about drugs, we talked about ways to be safe when having intercourse [….] I don’t know how seriously people took it,” she said. The teachers were from an external organization, but they were not well suited to the school. “My school consisted mainly of minorities and I remember specifically that [the teachers] weren’t that,” she noted.
The high school peer educator Martin Clark hasn’t had any contact with CHE, but his brother, a freshman at Wilbur Cross, has. Clark says that at his school, CHEs only teach the class during a “flex period,” which takes place every other Wednesday. During this flex period, teachers can request to see students if they need extra help, so the students who are free to take the health education workshops are the ones who are not flagged by their teachers to come in for extra help. “What’s even more problematic about that is it’s only the students who don’t need help from their teachers, so generally the smart kids are the ones who are exclusively getting taught,” Clark said. CHE works on a school-by-school basis to figure out a schedule for their ten session curriculum. “It depends on the school. It’s never an all school thing, it’s always in one classroom. So usually we will have relationships with specific teachers or a specific principle who assigns us to a classroom, but oftentimes it will happen either during gym or science class time.”
CHE is not the only group of students attempting to educate New Haven’s public schools. Planned Parenthood has taken a grassroots approach to sexual education. Their peer education program, STARS, is active in nearly all New Haven public high schools. “The ethos of STARS is if you’re able to educate one group of people and then sort of seed them out into the world then they’ll be a good source of information,” Wilbur Cross alum and former peer educator, Sophie Dillon, DC ’17, said. Clark described the peer educator’s role by saying, “On a daily basis it’s really just walking around the school, talking to people, being a resource for people—pretty much just being a walking, talking sex ed classroom.” But one difference between a STAR and a sex ed classroom is the more personal nature of the job. Clark says a large part of what he does is “talking to people one-on-one, answering questions, everything we say to people is confidential.”
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Despite important efforts from STARS and CHE, outside sex education cannot entirely replace a central, internal program. External programs simply do not have the same access to the students’ time. The Michigan model will, theoretically, reach all 20,000 students, but some are still dubious. According to Rich, “The public schools don’t have the resources or the teachers to teach it completely, and they don’t have systems in place since the schools haven’t been teaching health education K-12.” Looking beyond logistical issues, Lowenstein said, “It’s a good curriculum; it’s really comprehensive. It covers a much wider net of topics than we were able to cover in the ten sessions [run by CHE].” Rich stands by the content of the new curriculum but noted that it scales back some topics that the CHE curriculum covers, including masturbation. “[The Michigan Model] is definitely a more conservative curriculum than we were teaching, and it’s tailored to have homeroom teachers teach it,” said Rich.
The Michigan Model casts a wide net with its six categories—sexual behaviors, intentional and unintentional injury, poor diet, physical inactivity, alcohol and other drugs, and tobacco. The conservative nature of the curriculum lies in it’s three track options within the HIV & Other STI Prevention unit. Schools can choose to teach abstinence-only, abstinence-plus-condoms, or abstinence-plus-contraceptives to grades 9-12; only the former two options are available for grades 7-8. It is unclear which track New Haven will follow in its high schools.
A key difference between CHE’s program and the developing New Haven program is who is teaching the classes. CHE minimizes awkwardness by reducing the student-teacher age gap and having designated health education teachers. “We’re able to talk to kids and navigate what could be a very awkward situation with them because we come in as peers and not homeroom teachers,” said Rich. The New Haven program, on the other hand, will likely be taught by homeroom teachers. In Rich’s view, the potentially uncomfortable dynamic is important to consider. “Sometimes homeroom teachers leave while we are teaching because they are hesitant to teach about male anatomy, or a wet dream, or periods to a mixed gender class,” Rich said.
Despite STARS’s strict confidentiality rules, peer education relies on classmates knowing who the peer-educators are and being comfortable enough to ask them questions. But in high school especially, that can be challenging. Dillon notes one barrier she experienced with the STARS program at Wilbur Cross: “They just hired way too many white people,” she says. “Cross is really racially segregated.”
As the Michigan Model is implemented, CHE’s role is shifting. “Last year we stopped teaching our own middle school curriculum in most schools,” Rich said. “We are currently working with the New Haven Board of Education and some great people there to try and figure out how CHE can continue teaching in middle schools.” CHE teachers currently lead the puberty unit of the Michigan Model in four middle schools and continue to teach their own curriculum in high schools.
CHE and STARS have been crucial in filling in for the sex education that has been missing from NHPS’s curriculum for 20 years, but those involved will admit that their programs are not without flaws. CHE is only reaching a small proportion of the students, and racial and cultural barriers have, at least at Wilbur Cross, limited STARS’ outreach. In the district-mandated Michigan Model, the integrity of a peer-taught lesson will be lost. STARS will likely continue working as it has, and CHE hopes to continue collaboration with the school district to best implement the Michigan Model. With the new curriculum coming to New Haven Public Schools, though, finally all New Haven students will have access to sex education.