by Tracy Youngs

Created on: June 16, 2008   Last Updated: October 30, 2011

Sex sells! Everywhere we look we have the imagery of sex surrounding us. Women, scantilly clothed, frolic about on rap/R & B videos; men try to appease sexually motivated women by producing racy cologne advertisements in magazines. Even children's clothing billboards reveal toddler girls in outrageously short skirts and summer bathing suits. The fact of the matter is that sex is what the majority of our society focuses on both day and night.

So, what's the dilemma? How do we incorporate sex education into our school systems, primarily those where the overall population appears to be very conservative and/or set on traditional values and ethics? There is no easy answer to this question. Being an educator within the Virginia secondary school system myself, possessing a bachelor's in English studies and a master's in educational leadership, I, too, do not have the answer to this integral question.

I do, however, have a plethora of suggestions for administrators and parents alike though. First, the fear of the inevitable must be eliminated. That is to say, since we, as Americans, are quite aware that sex and sexuality pretty much dominate the media, it is best to eliminate the fear that students/children in the middle and high schools will somehow be "contaminated" by the content within a sex education course. The truth is they won't and most likely (unfortunately) have already begun to experiment in that arena somewhere around the age of twelve years old.

In Portland, Maine, Bouchard (2007) reports that King Middle School elected to establish a program which distributes birth control pills to students who request them. In a Harvard Medical School publication, Beal AC, Ausiello J, Perrin J (1999) assert that middle school students between the ages of 11-13 report to partake in "risky behaviors" such as cigarette, alcohol, and drug use as well as consensual sexual activity. Unfortunately, those students who ranked highest in sexual activity were those from urban, destitute, or primarily minority communities.

This information supports the above notion that middle school students are definitely engaging in sexual activity. So what can we do to offset that? As earlier stated, the initial step is to eliminate fear that sexual education will contaminate the secondary student. The second and perhaps most important step is to understand that sex education

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