Shakopee heeds parents' concerns on sex-ed course

Responding to parent complaints, the Shakopee School District decided Thursday that it will likely separate sixth-grade students by gender during the video portion of their sex-education course.

Superintendent Jon McBroom also said that after erring this year, district staff re-committed to providing more explicit parent notifications before the two-week course begins, so parents know they can review curriculum materials ahead of time or remove their children from the course.

"We believe that the human reproduction and sexual development of kids is a very important topic," McBroom said after the staff meeting.

Joy and Giovanni Massard and other parents asked the school board last week to separate the grade's 400 students by gender for the entire two-week sex education class.

While the district agrees students should be separated during the videos, pending school board approval, McBroom said classroom teachers who have developed relationships with students are best suited to lead the curriculum in mixed-gender classes.

The Massards, who initiated the complaint, declined to comment Thursday, saying that they wanted to hear from the district first.

Traumatizing students?

Parents asserted the district should provide a "nonembarrassing" alternative to sex education so students aren't teased if their parents remove them from the classes. And they said the district failed to address the emotional and beautiful aspects of sex, focusing instead on the biological part.

According to a chart of the sixth-grade health curriculum, Shakopee students learn about body changes during adolescence, the reproductive system and stages of human development before and after birth.

Students were shown a PBS video called "Life's Greatest Miracle," which shows a live-birth, and a video from Sunburst Communications called "The New Improved Me: Understanding Body Changes."

McBroom said Thursday that after a recently completed health curriculum review, the district is already looking for updated videos and curriculum materials that are educational and age-appropriate.

In past years, the district has provided a detailed letter describing the curriculum and emphasizing that parents can take their children out of the classes, McBroom said.

That was a mistake, McBroom said.

Precise details

The district plans next year to outline exactly what students will learn, such as menstruation, sperm production, body changes, and how babies develop.

"It's not something we intentionally did," McBroom said, "We're not trying to pull the wool over anybody's eyes so we can teach something that's inappropriate."

Parents can also decide to remove their children from the classroom for the course, he said. The district can either provide a less-detailed sex education curriculum to students in an independent-study setting, or parents can provide their own curriculum about development.

"We're not going to be overly aggressive in forcing people to do this," McBroom said. "But we believe that parents, if they don't want their child doing the school curriculum, should address the topics that are necessary for kids to know about as they mature."