High School Sexual Education

In addition to covering condoms and contraceptive use, schools should ensure that their sexual education programs are facilitated by both trained and qualified teachers and health professionals. Sexual education facilitators frequently report a lack of training as affecting their ability to teach and convey lasting messages to students. Teachers and nurses, who both commonly teach sexual education classes, have disparate and complementary knowledge, skills, and experiences, and are perceived differently by students. This effects what the students spend time on in class, as well as what information they retain. Therefore, in order to maximize the program 's success in lowering the teenage pregnancy and STD rates, schools must ensure that their …show more content…
According to Donovan (1998), not all undergraduate curricula require aspiring teachers to take a course in sexuality, or HIV/AIDS prevention (p. 191). Often, if teachers of sexual education programs receive training, it is “on the rudiments of the physiology of sexual education” (Gursimsek, 2010, p. 82) . Most teachers who teach sexual education are primarily physical education or biology teachers. Since teachers have not been trained as sexual health instructors, they don’t often possess in-depth knowledge on the topics that sexual education programs cover (Donovan, 1998, p. 191). According to Gursimsek (2010), teachers report that their lack of training affects their performance and that teaching sexual education is more difficult for them than teaching other classes, and that they are often embarrassed by the subject matter (p. 82). They also express concern about not being up-to-date on student lifestyles, or being accused by parents of pushing their own perceptions and values on students (Wight et al., 2003, p. 522). As a result of the lack of training and these concerns, teachers are significantly less comfortable discussing topics such as oral sex and abortion than they are discussing family values and abstinence-related topics, which significantly diminishes the effectiveness of the sexual education course (Donovan, 1998, p. 192). These teachers also report not preparing adequately to teach these courses, as sexual education classes are often under-prioritized by the school, parents, and students. Teachers of sexual health classes often spend a bulk of their time working on their other courses rather developing the sexual education course or preparing for lessons (Wight et al., 2003, p.