Personal Health and Wellness is a required class for all high schoolers at ELHS, and for many students it’s the only structured education they receive on topics like sexual health, substance use, and personal safety.
According to the Michigan Department of Education Summary of Legal Obligations and Best Practices relating to HIV/STI and Sex Education in Michigan Public Schools (MCL), schools can choose to educate their students on sex beyond only HIV/AIDS.
Most schools choose not to.
MCL requires health classes to teach students about refraining from sex and drugs, primarily through abstinence. This policy hasn’t been updated since 2004. Furthermore, the last time the MCL was even touched was over five years ago.
According to a poll, 100% of our Editorial Staff believes the State of Michigan’s health education curriculum is outdated and limited. Many critical topics like sexual health, substance use, and personal safety are avoided talking about in the depths that are necessary, sometimes merely because it can be uncomfortable. But avoiding discussions about difficult subjects doesn’t protect students from the complications that can come from sex and drugs, it just leaves students vulnerable and curious for themselves.
While ELHS does cover topics that will be useful in a teenagers life such as how to put on condoms, safe ways to have sex and what consent looks like at our age — we are only taught this in one short semester class, which the majority of students take in their freshman or sophomore year.
Health teacher, Robert Smith, feels that he is unable to build relationships with any of his students. The U.S Department of Educations ‘Using the Comfortability-in-Learning Scale to Enhance Positive Classroom Learning Environments’ studied showed “when students perceived instructors to exhibit positive communication behaviors they had more positive student communication behaviors and learning outcomes”; they are more likely to communicate and ask their instructor questions, which is essential when learning about your health and safety.
“It would be so cool if I had more time with my students,” Smith said. “I feel like I’m just starting to build relationships with them, and then the semester ends and I have to start all over again.”
The biggest concern we have with our sexual education is its lack of depth. Outside of a short health class, students aren’t shown many opportunities to continue their health education. As much as the health teachers try, they cannot cover all topics related to drug use, healthy habits, and the complexities of the human body.
Moving forward, it could be beneficial to incorporate in-school support throughout a student’s school career. Through student services, students could build good connections with their counselor starting their freshman year, just as they take health. Students would then be able to reach out to counselors easier with questions about their relationships, what to do in certain situations, and how to understand their body better.
This would especially be helpful in supporting students with rape and sexual assault – something that is not taught in health class, and is extremely important as one in five women in the United States experience completed or attempted rape during their lifetime, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.
In our health curriculum, we are only taught about how to give consent and what it looks like, not what to do if you are sexually assaulted or raped. Consent and preventing STI’s and Pregnancy is all the Michigan Rape Prevention & Education (MI RPE) Program requires health curriculums to teach. The remaining programs in the MI RPE are only in individual cities and were implemented due to community collaboration, something that can be done at ELHS.
With support from the school with these issues, students would be more informed about how to report sexual misconduct, what it would entail, and what impact it would have on their life. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, the root causes of sexual violence stem from oppression, and collaborations between community members especially in school is essential in prevention.
