Suburban Milwaukee Parents Offer Alternative Sex Ed

Controversy over how — and what — to teach about sex education has prompted a group of parents in a Milwaukee suburb to offer an alternative to the school district’s curriculum.This weekend 30 seventh graders from the Cedarburg School District will get sex education that’s different from what they’d get in the classroom. It’s an alternative to the district’s curriculum, which opponents contend is not medically accurate. Parent Jennifer Carlson says the district’s program also employs shame and guilt to promote abstinence, “So many parents are upset by that. We work very hard to boost the self esteem of our children and we really feel that—this is just one aspect of the (school’s) program that we have problems with—theuse of guilt and shame in no way promotes a young teen’s self esteem.”

The free, voluntary educational session will be taught by a pediatrician, along with a professor in clinical psychology. Carlson says it will present information about abstinence, along with contraception. Parents upset with the district’s curriculum— it’s called Choosing the Best– say it stresses the failure rates of birth control, “That program is a scripted program which focuses on the negative aspects of contraception and as a result does not provide complete accurate information on contraception”

In March of 2012, the Republican-controlled legislature changed Wisconsin’s human growth and development law to allow school district’s more leeway in what’s taught.