Lessons from Three School Districts

I recently had the opportunity to spend time with three diverse school districts to find out how they were managing to help their schools implement high-quality sexual health education, despite the many obstacles that often make it hard to teach this topic. These districts received funding from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Division of Adolescent School Health (CDC DASH), and Healthy Teen Network has provided capacity-building assistance to them since 2013. The district staff and teachers shared with us what having this funding has meant for them and how they used it to improve sexual health education. We created case studies to share their stories. In short, here is what they said matters the most for implementing high-quality sexual health education in schools:

• Strong policies. Policies are especially helpful when they specifically list the topics that must be covered and require that teachers receive professional development.
• A designated (and dedicated) champion. To keep sexual health education from falling to the bottom of the priority list, it’s essential to have a point person whose job description includes coordinating sexual health education.
• Relationships. The champion needs to make a plan to build and continuously maintain relationships. Showing up to meetings with counselors, nurses, wellness committees, teachers, and administrators takes time and effort—but it pays off in the end.
• Communication skills. People doing this work need to help stakeholders see the value of sexual health education, and they need to know how to build awareness of supportive policies. This is not as easy as it sounds, and champions sometimes need support from communication experts.
• A logical ‘home’ for sexual health education. Some districts don’t offer health as a subject at all, and those that do may only offer it in high school. And even then, health is not always a required subject. But sexual health education can fit into other core academic subjects, such as science and language arts, and the champion needs to help schools figure out where it fits.
• Easy access to high-quality, well-organized, thorough materials. In addition to lessons that are consistent with the characteristics of effective curricula, this could include supplementary guides, student workbooks, slides, educator kits, etc. Teachers are much more likely to implement sexual health education when they don’t have to do any extra work to get everything they need.
• Listening to teachers. Taking the time to regularly gather teacher feedback on what works/does not work and revising the lessons and materials accordingly helps teachers feel more invested in the lessons and makes the materials even more user-friendly.
• Professional development and coaching for teachers. Districts need to make sure they have the right people teaching this topic, and that the teachers feel ready to teach it. In addition to providing skills-based professional development, this involves checking in with teachers and following up as needed with coaching and co-teaching or modeling of challenging activities/lessons.

Want to learn more about how the districts did all of this? Read the case studies for more details on these schools’ lessons learned in implementing high-quality sexual health education.