{"id":35386,"date":"2023-03-07T01:05:14","date_gmt":"2023-03-07T08:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/bayfield-school-board-votes-to-remove-comprehensive-from-sex-education-curriculum\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T02:24:38","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T08:24:38","slug":"bayfield-school-board-votes-to-remove-comprehensive-from-sex-education-curriculum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/bayfield-school-board-votes-to-remove-comprehensive-from-sex-education-curriculum\/","title":{"rendered":"Bayfield school board votes to remove \u2018comprehensive\u2019 from sex education curriculum"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Bayfield
Bayfield School District now has Exclusive Chartering Authority, thanks to an application approval by the Colorado State Board of Education. (Jerry McBride\/Durango Herald)<\/span>cca<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Bayfield School District board members voted unanimously last month to remove the word \u201ccomprehensive\u201d from the school district\u2019s sex education curriculum, which may be illegal given the mandates of state law.<\/p>\n

Two school board members did not return phone calls seeking comment. Superintendent Leon Hanhardt said he would respond to questions submitted in writing from The Durango Herald<\/em>, but after 10 days he had not responded.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe school board has done this quietly, and seemingly intentionally, to avoid public attention,\u201d Bayfield resident Jason Mendoza said in an email to the Herald<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe adopted a new health curriculum,\u201d one board member said at the Feb. 14 meeting. \u201cWe are seeking to align our current policy with what we are administering with the curriculum. We are not doing comprehensive health curriculum at this time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bayfield Board of Education president Mike Foutz argued in the meeting that sex education should primarily be in the hands of parents and not schools.<\/p>\n

\u201cPart of the intent here is to emphasize the fact that parents have the primary responsibility for sex education and not the district,\u201d Foutz said. \u201cThe district should be supplementary in terms of sex education, and you\u2019ll see that change in here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt turns out that comprehensive can get the district into trouble pretty quick,\u201d board director Matt Turner said. Turner did not specify with whom the district could get into trouble.<\/p>\n

According to the Comprehensive Human Sexuality Education bill summary passed in 2019, Colorado school districts have two options when it comes to sex education: Districts can either opt out entirely of building it into their curriculum or teach it with strict state guidelines.<\/p>\n

According to colorado.gov<\/a>, the bill says that there are \u201ccertain content requirements for public schools that offer comprehensive human sexuality education, including instruction on consent as it relates to safe and healthy relationships and safe haven laws.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bill also says that sexual abstinence cannot be taught as the main \u201cacceptable preventive method available to students\u201d and prohibits shame-based or stigmatizing language that has been used by schools in the past. The bill also prohibits using gender stereotypes or \u201cexcluding the health needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender individuals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pregnancy outcome options are excluded from the bill\u2019s content requirements, but if schools do teach them as part of their sex education curriculum, they \u201cmust cover all pregnancy outcome options available,\u201d not just adoption.<\/p>\n

Mendoza said the board went ahead and made its decision without opening up discussion to the community.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe school district adopted a middle school curriculum in September 2022 that didn\u2019t meet the requirements of district policy regarding comprehensive sex education, never mentioning the conflict,\u201d he said. \u201cNow, five months later, the board quietly proposed and approved the policy change with no open discussion of the details, but the proposed changes were attached to the meeting agendas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mendoza said he contacted the board with his concerns and received a response that \u201cquoted state law out of context and presented objections to a distorted characterization of sex education as \u2018focusing on the mechanics of and myriad types of human sexual encounters and varieties of sexual intercourse and the moral appropriateness of such encounters.\u2019 It became apparent to me that the board objected to sex education, period, despite the data and widespread acceptance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Statistically, the U.S. has one of the highest teen birthrates of any wealthy, developed country. According to the National Institutes of Health\u2019s website<\/a>, abstinence-only sex education is ineffective at reducing teen birth, while the numbers have notably gone down in districts where comprehensive sex education is taught.<\/p>\n

According to the Journal of Adolescent Health<\/em><\/a>, comprehensive sex education has also helped to prevent violence between young people in relationships and helped them develop healthy relationships, as well as reduce rates of sexual activity, sexual risk behaviors, sexually transmitted infections and adolescent pregnancy.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a disservice to our students and our community for Bayfield School District to ignore the data to take such a prudish and backward step,\u201d Mendoza said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

specifies districts must follow a strict set of instruction guidelines<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35387,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[731,2766,155,28,107,1231,3947],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-35386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-bayfield","tag-bayfield-school-district","tag-education","tag-headlines","tag-laws","tag-pine-river-times","tag-sex"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35386"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82961,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35386\/revisions\/82961"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35386"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=35386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}