Weekly Round-Up: Alabama, Arizona, Nevada and Ohio

Alabama: Last week in Baldwin County school officials put a stop to condom distribution at a talk on HIV awareness.Arizona: The debate at Kyrene Elementary School District continues. The question is whether schools should tell sixth- through eighth-graders that sex can mean oral, anal and vaginal acts and that STDs can be contracted through all these methods. Another article notes that nearly a third of ninth-graders in the state have already have had sexual intercourse. The Kyrene governing board will vote on the proposed changes in the sex-education curriculum at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the district office, 8700 S. Kyrene Road.And Kyrene isn’t the only school district in Arizona that’s tackling this issue. The Chandler Unified School District will take up this issue in the coming weeks. Currently Seventh-, eighth- and 10th-grade health classes in the district use programs supplied by Catholic Charities that offer no discussion of birth control.Nevada: CityLife provides readers with an insider’s look into the Clark County School District’s sexual education curriculum committee. The nine-member committee evaluates materials and makes curricula recommendations to the school board. The article demonstrates how the ideas and opinions of a small committee can have a big impact on what kind of sex education teens are taught.Ohio: Beginning this academic year, eighth-graders in Frederick County will learn about pregnancy prevention and fifth-graders will receive an introduction to HIV⁄AIDS.Meanwhile, the school board at Timken High School has decided to expand sex education following news reports that 13 percent of female students at the high school were pregnant at the start of the past academic year. Rev. David Morgan, who served on a committee that developed the new lesson plans, says the new curriculum “moves beyond, ‘Just say No,’ which doesn’t work.” Some of the health textbooks were from 1988.