A national nonprofit has flunked Florida when it comes to sex education for K-12 students.
In Florida, public schools don’t have to teach sex ed. If they do, the Florida Department of Education must approve their curriculum, and parents can opt out for any reason.
Sex ed content geared toward LGBTQ+ students is outright banned in the state.
In summary, the report found: “Florida has more laws prohibiting topics from being taught in sex education than laws requiring topics to be taught.”
For these reasons, the national nonprofit Sex Ed for Social Change gave Florida an F. It’s among thirteen, mostly Republican states that received a failing grade, including states like Ohio, Indiana and Mississippi.
Last year, the Florida Department of Education told Florida schools to focus sex-ed programs on abstinence-only education. And urged at least a dozen schools to nix their sex ed curriculum completely.
In Central Florida this school year, Orange, Osceola, Seminole, Brevard, Marion, Volusia, and Flagler County school districts all provide either standalone sex ed classes or reproductive health instruction in Biology class to students.
Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Florida Republicans who supported changes to sex education in recent years say it’s just another way the state protects parental choice.
Daneila Mcvea-Smith is Planned Parenthood of Florida’s education program director. She says sex ed teaches basic life skills and without it, kids aren’t prepared for adulthood.
“We're teaching about healthy relationships. We're teaching about consent. We're teaching about decision making, pregnancy prevention, STI (sexually transmitted infection) prevention. Eventually they'll be adults who may learn through intervention instead of prevention,” Mcvea-Smith said.
Mcvea-Smith said, without basic sex ed, students may end up in sexually and physically abusive relationships without knowing that’s happening, or not have the language to describe that they’ve been raped or molested.
Or the most obvious consequence, she said, students could end up pregnant before they’re ready to be a parent.
“If you're not learning about what consent is or about what healthy relationships are, it will become an issue where you will be in an unhealthy relationship, or a situation may occur and you may not know,” Mcvea-Smith said.
“Or even something like learning how to take birth control correctly, a birth control pill correctly, how to put a condom on correctly. You know, people think of that as just basic information that over time, is just learned, and that's not really what it is. There are actual steps. There's actual processes.”
Mcvea-Smith said it’s crucial for parents to step up in the absence of sex education at their child’s school and talk about these topics with them. Otherwise, young people might turn to other less age-appropriate or informed sources for this information.
“They're either going to learn it through technology, friends or through user error, and the hope is that they learn that information early, so that when it's time for them to use it, they already know how to do it,” Mcvea-Smith said.
If parents don’t feel comfortable having “the talk” with students, Mcvea-Smith said they can turn to a variety of free, online and in-person resources at community centers and clinics in Central Florida, including Planned Parenthood.
