Dallas ISD Trustees Consider Expanding Sex Education

Dozens of speakers packed a Dallas school board meeting Thursday to make their voices heard on hot-button proposals: one expanding sex education and another that would create partnerships with charter schools for some prekindergarten campuses.Trustees were expected to vote on the two matters as the meeting ran late into the night.Under the sex education proposal, Dallas ISD would begin teaching sex education at the end of the sixth grade in core science classes rather than just in the health courses taught in the later years of middle school. Such lessons would also be incorporated into required high school biology classes rather than just in the health course, which is optional.Student Joe Gallegos urged DISD trustees to expand access to accurate information about safe-sex to better prevent teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases."Every teenager talks about sex although they don't really know the real facts and consequences," Gallegos said. "We deserve to have the real facts about sex education."Speaker Fay Simon said students need to learn about how unsafe sex can lead to illnesses like cervical cancer."The ugly statistics about high-risk behavior needs to presented," she said.A DISD-advisory committee made up of parents and other community members spent more than a year reviewing new material and how the district should teach sex education.  Continue reading...