By Andrea Kalfoglou
My local county school board has been struggling for the past few years to come up with a new sex education curriculum that satisfies everyone — or that can at least get past the lawsuits and delays. About 15 miles away, a DC school is using a program that, as Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy writes, “might well be the gold standard,” for sex education programs.
The Carrera Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Program, developed in 1984 by Michael Carrera of the Children’s Aid Society, is a “far cry from the traditional approach” to sex education in public schools. Instead of providing students with “the old health class with a gym teacher’s lecture on safe sex or abstinence,” the Carrera program offers a “holistic approach” that teaches students “basic skills” along with “heavy doses of self-respect, integrity, discipline, responsibility and teamwork,” according to Milloy. Students take classes in “family life” and sex education that are “age appropriate and involve parents who also take classes on how to talk to their children about sensitive issues,” Milloy writes.
Carrera programs, implemented at schools across the U.S., have reduced teen pregnancy by 50% and increased high school graduation rates, according to the Children’s Aid Society. None of the 5,000 teens enrolled in the program through 2003 has reported testing HIV-positive. According to Milloy, some people have said the program’s cost of about $8,000 per student annually is too expensive.
My public health students were shocked to learn that we spend less than 1 out of every $100 of our health care dollars in the U.S. on prevention. Do we really need a cost effectiveness study to demonstrate that a program that reduces teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, and school drop out rates is worth the investment?
Andrea Kalfoglou is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County