Tami Fitzgerald, executive director of the NC Values Coalition, explains that the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) is charged with writing new standards about every 10 years. That is not curriculum, but a guideline of what to teach children after they have been taught curriculum.
While working through three drafts of the latest standards over the past year year, her organization either met with Catherine Truitt, the superintendent of public instruction, or wrote her letters about their concerns.
Now, despite repeated assurances that the standards would comply with the state statute on teaching sex education, Fitzgerald says the state Board of Education has failed North Carolina's children by adopting rules that minimize the risk of pregnancy and STDs and fail to teach abstinence.
DPI staff claim the new standards do comply with state requirements on promoting abstinence, but NC Values Coalition thinks they fall short.
"They do not require the teaching of a mutually faithful monogamous heterosexual relationship in the context of marriage as the best lifelong means to avoid sexually-transmitted diseases," Fitzgerald notes.
Instead, the new standards send a confusing message to children about sex that she predicts will escalate sexual activity, pregnancy, and STD rates and give the Planned Parenthood types a platform to teach children about sexuality.
"One of the main beefs that we have with these standards is that they do not teach abstinence as the expected standard," she reiterates. "The standards also do not provide opportunities to allow for interaction between the parent and the student, and that's required by the statute."
Fitzgerald says these new school standards suffer seven different deficiencies, but "unless the legislature intervenes, we're going to be stuck with [them] for another 10 years."
