Jul 27, 2007  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO J  | COMMENTS     

sexual orientation variation is NOT a mental illness or necessarily problematic.”

The Healthy Youth Coalition recommendations call for these additional changes or additions:

• Add more information about transgender issues in a separate lesson for ninth grade students.

• Add information on the “skills related to saying no to unwanted, unintended or unprotected sex” and on “insisting on using condoms or other forms of contraception.”

• Add information about masturbation, which is not included in the standards, and on “the range of sexual behaviors that are open to young people other than intercourse.”

• Add specific instructional information on how to use condoms effectively and where to get them.

Marc Clark, the school system’s director of health operations, said the city’s elected board of education, now called the State Board of Education, must approve the standards following a period of public comment.

Clark said school system standards and curricula in effect since 1979 allow the teaching of human sexuality but do not provide the specific topics on gay issues and other subjects included in the proposed new standards. He said the new standards would be used as a foundation to develop a new sex education curriculum that is to incorporate the topics included in the standards.

Officials with the local groups Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League, Parents & Friends of Lesbians & Gays, and Metro Teen AIDS, which provide services for gay and transgender youth, have said their respective groups have participated in class discussions with students on gay-related issues in some D.C. high schools and middle schools.

“My guess is it’s hit or miss,” said Linda Garnett, executive director of the D.C. PFLAG chapter. “It’s often up to the principle or the teacher to decide whether to have us there.”

Garnett said gay and lesbian students have told PFLAG instructors they wished they had taken a gay-inclusive sex education class at an earlier age.

“Many kids still tell us they would have greatly benefited if someone told them they were not sick or crazy,” Garnett said.