Creating Model Sexual Health Education Policies for Schools and Districts

The political climate in Louisiana makes implementing comprehensive sexual health education challenging. While state law permits schools to teach about condoms and contraception, most schools do not understand the policies and use abstinence-only curricula. Given the high rates of adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases in Louisiana, School Health Connection (SHC),a program of the Louisiana Public Health Institute, is working directly with schools to clarify the state law and assist schools in developing building-level comprehensive sexual health education policies and in implementing sexual health education programming. Through a needs assessment of high school health educators, it was determined that schools are at different levels of readiness for implementing comprehensive sexual health education. SHC worked with urban public middle and high schools that had identified sexual health education as a priority to develop and implement comprehensive sexual health education policies.  Through working with individual schools, SHC created a model comprehensive sexual health education policy that aligns with state and local laws and regulations. This model policy can be used as the basis of building-level policies at other schools throughout Louisiana. This presentation will share lessons learned throughout this process, as well as a model comprehensive sexual health education policy.