Head Strong: Peer-to-peer sex education draws fire

2.17.2008

By Michael Smerconish

Everything I needed to know about sex I learned playing street hockey. In those teenage years, sex came up just about everywhere. Playing sports. At the movies. Drinking a Frank's soda. All over.

Except home. And certainly not in any classroom.

I learned about sex from the guys I hung out with. And looking back, I realize that the better informed among them were usually the ones who had older siblings. They experimented and whispered down the lane. We learned.

Maybe that's why I didn't initially blanch when I heard of a sex-education controversy in which older students are involved in teaching the younger ones at Clearview Regional High School in Mullica Hill. The same program is being used at about 50 New Jersey high schools.

The New Jersey Teen Prevention Education Program (Teen PEP) is sponsored by the N.J. Department of Health and Senior Services, along with HiTOPS Inc. (Health-Interested Teens Own Program on Sexuality) and the Princeton Center for Leadership Training. It's an elective program for juniors and seniors who, with their teachers, conduct a total of five to six "outreach sessions" for freshmen during the school year. The students present skits and run activities, all under the close supervision of their teachers. The topics for this year go beyond abstinence and birth control methods to sexual harassment, alcohol/drugs and their influence on sexual decision making, dating violence, and talking with parents.

Report cards aren't the only thing coming home from school in Mullica Hill these days. So are stories about what happens in Teen PEP - some to the horror of parents.

Lisa Westermann told me she won't soon forget her family dinner on Dec. 7. You could say she experienced her own day of infamy when her 14-year-old son recounted his school day.

"We were sitting down having dinner. He told me he had a bad day in English. I thought maybe he flunked a test. Instead he told me an upper classman told him how to put a condom on a banana. And they told him when he wanted to have sex to go to a clinic, it was OK to keep it a secret from your parents, it's legal, and then they broke into small group discussions with male and female peer leaders . . . male and female 14-year-olds in groups. . . . He told me he felt very strange, weird, confused and really embarrassed."

Westermann had never been afforded a parental notification slip, a mistake for which the school was apologetic.

Michael Porter is the Teen PEP adviser and an English instructor at the high school. Tongue in cheek, he told me that "when I first started to hear some of the revolting things that were happening in Teen PEP workshops, I was ready to start protesting the group myself, until I remembered that I was in charge of it."

Porter said one of the main sources of confusion was that "the critics are judging our program and making factual claims about what students saw and heard based on their reading of the Teen PEP curriculum, not based on what they, or even their students observed." The written curriculum, he said, is not always used in class.

I asked him if it were true that a Teen PEP session ended with a chant of "Sex can wait just masturbate."

Porter said it was one of the "most frustrating and spurious claims I'm hearing." He provided me with the context he said critics were ignoring:

"At the end of our pregnancy prevention workshop, the following dialogue is delivered to the freshmen participants:

Student 1: If you can't talk about it -

Student 2: Or if you have too many questions about it -

Student 3: Or if you just don't want to take the risk -

Student 4: Maybe you're just not ready for sex.

Student 5: And that's cool.

Students 6 and 7: Sex can wait.

All students: Masturbate.

Students 6 and 7: That's cool.

"Admittedly, this is not Emmy Award-winning dialogue, and I don't want to have to defend self-pleasuring as an acceptable substitute for risky sexual behavior, but the context of the line is completely ignored. Four separate powerful reasons are presented to students for abstaining from sexual involvement, but this is lost in the emphasis on the masturbation reference," explained Porter.

I don't know if that will appease Natalie Fortunato. She's a concerned parent who has created a petition in opposition to Teen PEP at www.purepioneers.org. She has read the 900-page PEP Faculty Adviser Handbook and shared with me some of its contents, including a worksheet titled "So What's An Abstinence Anyway?" It contains some pretty graphic stuff.

In Step 1 of that document, students are asked to circle behaviors they believe a "person can engage in and still be abstinent." Among the choices: "mutual masturbation," "anal intercourse," and "watching porn videos."

At Clearview, this activity was not conducted with the freshman workshop, but was one of the first activities with juniors and seniors. Michael Porter said he did not relish talking about these subjects, but that it was necessary in a world where some teens did not consider oral or anal intercourse to "count" as sex.

"I am the father of a 15-year-old girl," Porter said. "Believe me, I am terrified of the sexually saturated culture that she is surrounded by. I sincerely hope that she chooses to postpone sexual involvement for a long, long, long time. At the same time, as a second-best alternative, I want her to have the information to be safer, should she make a different choice. Despite one of our critic's malicious caricature of our peer educators as 'the boys down the street' who want to 'educate' their daughters on a 'Friday and Saturday night,' our peer educators are mature, responsible, well-trained, and constantly supervised. I would not hesitate for a second to allow my daughter to participate in the Teen PEP workshops."

Of course, there would be no need for sex education in schools if kids were learning it at home. Or while playing street hockey. But too many aren't.