BRUNSWICK COUNTY, N.C. (WECT) – The Brunswick County School Board is one step closer to finalizing its new sex education curriculum.
Board President Steven Berger said the board has received a lot of negative feedback about the current sex education curriculum. Specifically, it was pointed out that the concept of abstinence was not emphasized in the feedback.
“It's certainly been swept under the rug, and we wanted to make sure there was more emphasis on that, like all other important topics,” Berger said. “We just created a level playing field for all topics because they are all so important.”
North Carolina now requires leaders to teach that “abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage is a standard expected of all school-age children.”
After raising the issue at last year's meeting, the board established a committee to create a new curriculum that would “balance educational content with community values.” The board then considered five new curricula. The new curriculum, selected from among the five, will be provided by the non-profit organization “NC Shape.''
Berger said the best part about the new curriculum is that it's open source, meaning districts can download it and post it on their websites for parents to review.
“This is a sensitive topic,” Berger said. “So seventh, eighth and ninth graders can watch it with their parents from the comfort of their own home. Being open source increases transparency and increases parent and community involvement.”
The board also decided to remove all videos from the new curriculum. This program is open sourced and uses YouTube for video playback. The school system says YouTube automatically links to other videos that are not necessarily appropriate for the age group. Since we couldn't control this, we decided to do away with video completely.
Parents still have the option to opt their children out of part or all of the curriculum, even after the statewide Parent Bill of Rights law was passed last year.
But Berger said he hopes the new curriculum meets most of parents' wishes.
“We also want to make sure we have community input in every decision we make,” Berger said. “And the board decided that by listening to the community and how board members felt about it, we needed to make sure we did a better job of establishing a curriculum that better met community standards.”
The board unanimously agreed to move this item to the consent agenda. It is scheduled to be voted on at the next board meeting on May 7th.
Berger said the new curriculum will likely be implemented in the 2024-2025 school year.
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