It wasn’t a typical permission slip, but Mona Mangat signed it.
Ostensibly, a group known as More 2 Life was giving a presentation on “life choices” before her daughter’s seventh grade class at Thurgood Marshall Middle School in St. Petersburg.
“It says things like… ‘we will not be discussing sex, we will talk about good choices,’” Mangat said. “It was a strange permission slip.”
Later that evening a friend with a child in the same grade called and told her to check the group out.
“I looked them up and then all the alarms started going off, and I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness’ when I realized that it was a Christian organization that was actually funded by a pregnancy crisis center.”
The program was supposed to be taught during a “culinary arts and career” class (which the kids call “the cooking class” — there was no time for the presentation in regular health class, school officials told her), and emphasized abstinence-only sex education, which the school is required to teach.
That’s because Florida law mandates that all public schools promote “abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage as the expected standard for all school-age students while teaching the benefits of monogamous heterosexual marriage.”
The state calls that programming “abstinence plus.”
But there is no state standard for providing students with medically accurate information about sex. School districts are allowed to conduct sexual education courses, the law says, as long as they’re age-appropriate. So there’s no consistency among districts; sometimes not even among schools.
“There’s no standard of expectation from all of these counties to provide this information,” said Kimberly Diaz of the Healthy Teens campaign, a sex ed advocacy group launched by Planned Parenthood. “So it’s really up to each county to take this initiative to provide medically accurate, age-appropriate comprehensive sexual education.”
And despite sex education advocates’ efforts to get such standards passed at the state level, a law doesn’t seem likely in the current climate.
Meanwhile, Florida now has the highest rate of new HIV infections in the country. The Tampa Bay area has the 16th-highest number of HIV infections in the country; Miami has the highest. The state also has the 12th-highest teen pregnancy rate.
Obviously abstinence is the best way to prevent pregnancy and STIs, but comprehensive sex ed advocates argue that many teenagers engage in sexual activity (whether we like it or not) and ought to be informed of its risks.
“I believe that we need to teach comprehensive sex education,” said Hillsborough County School Board member April Griffin. “I believe we need to give people the facts so that they can make healthy decisions with their lives. And it helps keep kids in school when they’re not having to deal with pregnancy and STIs.”
Hillsborough and Pinellas schools both teach some sex ed, but Griffin says there ought to be more, or that it should be done in a way that reaches more kids.
“The statistics tell me that we can do a better job,” she said.
The other problem with the abstinence-only mandate can be a constitutional one. Pushing religion in public schools is a violation of the First Amendment, and abstinence-only programs are often taught by Christian groups.
That’s why Mangat didn’t send that permission slip back with her daughter. Instead, she and other parents contacted school and district officials, as well as the Madison, Wisc.-based Freedom From Religion Foundation.
The group was able to obtain an outline of the More 2 Life curriculum. The content wasn’t overtly religious — no mention of Jesus or the Bible — but it was obviously inspired by religious tenets, she said.
“It was… clearly biased,” she said. “It was clearly Christian teaching. It was… really more fundamentalism.”
One of the bullet points was an analogy comparing sex to fire, she said with a laugh, adding that there seemed to be an element of shame directed at people who don’t live by the group’s guidelines.
While More 2 Life didn’t return requests for comment by deadline, Jason Dorr, the group’s director, told ABC Action News in January that the group aims simply to encourage students “to choose to wait until marriage — abstinence until marriage — and we talk about the benefits of that.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation was able to persuade the Pinellas County School District to investigate More 2 Life’s teaching methods for possible religious content. The investigation, carried out by the district’s Family Life Education Committee, involved committee members sitting in on the course as well as a “focus group” of students who were asked whether they perceived the presentation as religious.
In a letter sent to the foundation last month, an attorney for Pinellas County Schools said the district is allowing More 2 Life to present to schools as long as it revises its permission slip (which it has) and allows school officials to review its lesson plans. One revision that has already been made changes the phrase “starting over” to “choosing abstinence.”
School officials can also randomly audit the lessons as they see fit.
But Freedom From Religion Foundation attorney Andrew Seidel doesn’t think those changes are sufficient.
“We appreciate that they actually did do an investigation, and what looks like a pretty serious investigation,” he said. “But this is very clearly a religious group. They describe themselves as a ministry. That gives them absolutely zero expertise when it comes to these important issues, and the school is still allowing them to come in.”
A religious group, regardless of which words they choose to admit, is going to have a religious message, he added.
“The fact that they’re masking it in secular language doesn’t necessarily solve the problem,” he said. “Because, again, at the most basic level, their goal is to get kids to behave in a way that they see is comporting with their Bible.”
Next school year, Mangat has another daughter who will be entering the seventh grade at Thurgood Marshall. The permission slip may be revised, but it won’t get her signature.
There are many issues she’d like to see in such a course — “these are good choices, these are healthy choices, this is a health class, this is sex ed” — but none of those are present in presentations by groups like More 2 Life.
“The context is not there.”
This article appears in Aug 20-26, 2015.