What should a modern sexual education curriculum look like? How much should teachers tell kids about sex in a school environment? And what topics are parents truly comfortable with their kids learning?
 
As Craig Manning writes in this week's Northern Express, sister publication of The Ticker, these questions have been batted around for years, often with no clear resolution or forward momentum. This coming school year, though, a Traverse City church is offering up a new kind of sex ed program — one that is progressive, comprehensive, and largely groundbreaking. It also has the potential to be extremely controversial — especially among parents or educators who believe strongly in the lessons of abstinence and prevention that have typically dominated sex ed curricula in a public-school environment.

The program, called Our Whole Lives (OWL), will be offered throughout the 2019-2020 school year by the Unitarian Universality Congregation of Grand Traverse (UUCGT). It’s a program concept that was developed several years ago in collaboration between the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ. As the name of the program implies, the goal was to create “lifespan sexuality education,” where learners at different stages of life could access and engage with information relevant to their sexual experience levels and situations. There are currently six curricula in the OWL program, starting with grades K-1 and moving up to adulthood. Each curriculum is aimed at providing accurate information about sexuality, in a way that “dismantles stereotypes and assumptions, builds self-acceptance and self-esteem, fosters healthy relationships, improves decision making, and has the potential to save lives.”

"It seems like the focus with sex education in the past was to prevent problems: to educate so there wouldn't be sexually-transmitted infections or unintended pregnancies,” says Katie Tomczyk, a religious education teacher with UUCGT who will serve as a facilitator for the new sex ed program. “Our program does include those components, but it goes above and beyond them to help students consider more of what defines ‘sexual health’: feeling good about themselves and their bodies; trying to be healthy and smart; having positive, equitable, loving relationships.”
 
The curriculum coming to UUCGT this year specifically targets grades 7-9 and aligns with when students in the public-school system typically go through sex ed classes. It will feature 25 workshops, each about two hours long, that will focus on a wide array of sexuality-related topics. The program will run from October through early May and is open to any student in the age range, regardless of cultural background or religious affiliation.

The OWL program is radically different from what exists in most high school environments – both locally and throughout Michigan. State law requires all public-school districts to provide instruction on sexually transmitted diseases, “including, but not limited to, HIV/AIDS,” but has few required curriculum points beyond that. The law also states that “Instruction in HIV/AIDS and sex education must stress that abstinence from sex is a responsible and effective method of preventing unplanned or out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and that it is the only protection that is 100 percent effective against unplanned pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and sexually transmitted HIV infection and AIDS.”
 
Jame McCall, associate superintendent for Traverse City Area Public Schools (TCAPS), says the school district follows this requirement for an “abstinence-based curriculum” closely, and notes that there have been “no significant changes” to the sex ed curriculum in many years. Topics like sexual orientation and gender identification are not discussed at all, and parents have the right to review all course materials ahead of time and exempt their children from sex ed classes if they so wish. “I would say that we are very much on the conservative side of sexual education, which is exactly what the state law would require of us,” McCall says.

Read more about the new versions of sex ed coming to some parts of northern Michigan - including the OWL program, as well as a new progressive curriculum coming to Petoskey - in this week's issue of the Northern Express. The Northern Express is available to read online, or pick up a free copy at one of nearly 700 spots in 14 counties across northern Michigan.