A California school district won't implement its new sex education curriculum. Parents gave the proposal a thumbs down after reviewing the materials. They described the content as "extremely provocative" and unfit for middle school students.
Members of the Cupertino Union School District voted 2-2 on the new sex education curriculum. They needed a majority vote to pass the proposal, hence the school board called a meeting Tuesday. Some 150 parents attended and 50 got up to speak about why they were against the new sex education curriculum.
"The data in it was explicit; it was extremely provocative," mom Sri Sarma said, as per Mercury News. "It was written with too much suggestion. The entire approach was all about perform, not about inform."
Parents also brought signs at the meeting to protest the sex education curriculum. "Do not put adult ideas in my child's head," one of the signs read, as per New York Daily News.
The sex education materials in question discussed vaginal sex, as well as oral and anal sex, according to the parents' petition on Change.Org. It also tackled homosexuality and same-sex sexual interactions.
Sex education teacher Barbara Wooley, however, said middle school students are ready for those materials. "I think some of them may be past their due date on being ready for this," Wooley told CBS News.
California mandated school districts to come up with a comprehensive sex education curriculum for seventh and eighth grade students following the passing of the California Healthy Youth Act in January 2016. The current curriculum uses materials from 2003. Some teachers said a lot of these are heterosexual-oriented when it's not the case today.
"You cannot teach somebody how to not contract HIV or any other STI (sexually transmitted infection) without telling them how one contracts an STI," Wooley said. Since the Cupertino Union School District lost the majority vote, however, it will have to figure out another way to comply with the state mandate without making parents furious.
