Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com. Sch’dy schools: sex ed or no sex ed?
Last week this newspaper ran a story based on new Census Bureau numbers showing that the birth rate among teenage girls in Schenectady County increased slightly over the last two years while it fell slightly for girls in the state as a whole. In Schenectady the rate went up from 66 to 68 births per 1,000 girls, while in the state as a whole it went down from 61 down to 58. Not a big deal but the sort of thing a local newspaper necessarily takes note of. Once the story appeared, our education reporter followed up by requesting information on Schenectady school district’s sex education program, if any, and the next day an editorial writer inquired about the same thing. In response, Superintendent Eric Ely sent out an e-mail addressed to “!Board; !Cabinet2” saying “The Gazette appears to be targeting the district’s Family Education curriculum,” and 14 minutes later he got back a reply from school board member and former president Jeff Janiszewski, saying, “Gazette has been on this mantra before …” As for the usefulness of sex education in preventing pregnancies, Janiszewski said that in his own conversations over the years with administrators and teachers regarding pregnant teenagers, “very few got pregnant due to lack of sex education and perhaps most frightening, many if not most of them got pregnant purposefully.” This shows that Janiszewski does not know the meaning of either “mantra” or “purposefully,” but it also demonstrates a certain paranoia — wouldn’t you say? — about the Gazette’s routine reporting of local news, to say that we’re on a mantra. Whatever he believes a mantra to be, it’s clearly not something good. And then Ely’s remark that we are “targeting” their curriculum. Which explains why the school district gave only the briefest and least informative one-line response to the reporter who wrote the first story and no response at all to the editorial writer. (It goes without saying that they don’t respond to me.) But it also reveals a certain confusion in the school district over what kind of sex education, if any, it offers. Karen Corona, spokeswoman for the district, told our education reporter in an e-mail, “We don’t have a ‘sex education’ program. The district has a ‘family life’ program and curriculum.” Janiszewski, however, said in his e-mail, “We require parents to opt in to our sex ed program,” which I take to mean kids don’t get the program unless their parents request it, but which I also take to mean it is indeed a sex education program and not some watered-down “family life” program. But I don’t know. My research shows that family life sometimes includes sex, in addition to vacations at the beach. The bigger question is how realistic the school’s instruction is with regard to preventing pregnancy. Clearly it’s not very effective. .....................>>>>................>>>>................http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....r01100&AppName=1
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