A progressive nonprofit has flunked Florida when it comes to sex education for K-12 students.
In Florida, public schools don't have to teach sex ed. If they do, the Florida Department of Education must approve the curriculum, and parents can opt out for any reason.
Sex ed content geared toward LGBTQ+ students is outright banned in the state.
In summary, the report from SIECUS: Six Ed for Social Change found: "Florida has more laws prohibiting topics from being taught in sex education than laws requiring topics to be taught."
For these reasons, the national nonprofit gave Florida an F, one of 13 mostly Republican states that received a failing grade, including Ohio, Indiana and Mississippi.
SIECUS, founded in 1964 by a Planned Parenthood medical director, describes itself as focused on advancing progressive sex education policy to affect change at the local, state and national levels.
Last year, the Florida Department of Education told schools to focus on abstinence-only sex education and urged at least a dozen schools to nix their sex ed curriculum completely.
Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Florida Republicans who promoted changes to sex education in recent years say it's just another way the state protects parental choice.
Through his support of the 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act, DeSantis has said that “instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation does not belong in the classroom,” emphasizing that “it should be up to the parent to decide if and when to introduce these sensitive topics.”
However, Daneila Mcvea-Smith, Planned Parenthood of Florida's education program director, says sex ed teaches basic life skills and without it kids aren't prepared for adulthood.
"We're teaching about healthy relationships. We're teaching about consent. We're teaching about decision-making, pregnancy prevention, STI (sexually transmitted infection) prevention. Eventually, they'll be adults who may learn through intervention instead of prevention," Mcvea-Smith said.
Mcvea-Smith said without basic sex ed, students may end up in sexually and physically abusive relationships without knowing or not have the language skills to describe that they've been raped or molested.
Or the most obvious consequence, she said, students could end up pregnant before they're ready to be a parent.
"If you're not learning about what consent is or about what healthy relationships are, it will become an issue where you will be in an unhealthy relationship, or a situation may occur and you may not know," Mcvea-Smith said.
"Or even something like learning how to take birth control correctly, a birth control pill correctly, how to put a condom on correctly. You know, people think of that as just basic information that over time is just learned, and that's not really what it is. There are actual steps. There's actual processes."
Mcvea-Smith said it's crucial for parents to step up in the absence of sex education at their child's school and talk about these topics with them. Otherwise, young people might turn to other less age-appropriate or informed sources for this information.
"They're either going to learn it through technology, friends or through user error, and the hope is that they learn that information early, so that when it's time for them to use it, they already know how to do it," Mcvea-Smith said.
If parents don't feel comfortable having "the talk" with students, Mcvea-Smith said they can turn to a variety of free, online and in-person resources at community centers and clinics.
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