Each week, “Pop Quiz” features an interview with a member of Greater Houston’s education community. To suggest someone we should interview with an interesting story to tell, email us at education@houstonlanding.org.
Meet the interviewee
Valentine’s Day is a reminder that love doesn’t always lead to the smartest decisions. That’s where sex education can help.
According to the CDC, Texas boasts some of the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections among teens in the country, with Harris County closely mirroring or surpassing state averages. Texas also lies above the national average in teen pregnancy, with roughly 20 in every 1,000 Texas teens aged 15 to 19 reported pregnant in 2022.
Although school districts in Texas are not required to provide sex education to high school students, such classes have been proven to help students avoid risk factors like pregnancy that can lead to dropping out.
Belinda Hernandez, an assistant professor of health promotion and behavioral sciences at UTHealth Houston School of Public Health, is part of a team helping school districts implement evidence-based sexual health programs, helping set students up with healthy life skills through graduation and beyond.
Unlike some students’ sex ed experiences with condom bananas or scare-tactic STI slideshows, evidence-based sexual health programs have been evaluated through rigorous scientific study and proven to work, Hernandez said.
“One of the key characteristics of an evidence-based program is that (it shows) changes in behavior, and not just in students’ attitudes or knowledge, but we’re seeing changes in their actual sexual behavior,” Hernandez said. “So things like increasing the number of kids who abstain from sex, or increasing condom or contraceptive use, or decreasing the number of sexual partners, those are the types of behaviors that we’re looking for.”
Still, most Texas school districts don’t offer evidence-based sex education or any sex education at all, Hernandez said. For that reason, UTHealth created an online tool, called the iCHAMPSS model, to guide district officials step by step through the process of setting up a sex ed program.
The Houston Landing spoke with Hernandez this week to learn more about her work, its benefits, and how she tries to get parents and school districts on board.
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
What challenges have you seen school districts experience when it comes to setting up a sexual health program?
One of the biggest challenges that we’ve seen across school districts is always the perceived parent support, or lack thereof. School districts are always worried about what parents think, and they’re scared that parents are not going to be supportive. But we find in study after study that the majority of parents want sexual health education in schools. So it’s really just a perceived challenge by school districts, but we find that, you know, parents actually want it. …
The other challenges that we see are related to the districts’ capacity and resources. Sometimes school districts don’t know what evidence-based programs are. They don’t know where to find programs that are considered evidence-based. They also don’t know what’s required in the state law and how to integrate health education, sexual health education, into their current curriculum, because health education is not a requirement for graduation in the high schools. … But again, we provide these tools on iCHAMPSS to kind of help them overcome some of these challenges.
What’s something that people regularly misunderstand about your work?
I think the biggest thing they misunderstand is that they think you’re either for abstinence-only, or for abstinence-plus, or you’re for a comprehensive sexual health education. But what we’re really in favor of is all programs that we know work. … There’s abstinence-only and abstinence-plus programs that are evidence-based. We’re really in favor of using a program that actually works … (so) you can be confident that you’re going to have a positive impact on these kids. So I think that’s one of the misconceptions, that there’s no program that fits my values or something, but I think if you look, you’ll find that there’s some evidence-based programs out there that fit all types of values and that are effective.
Could you give an example of what separates evidence-based education from other programs?
I just want to say that with any program, everybody has good intentions, but sometimes the way they go about it is just not the most effective way. A lot of times, people want to scare students, and they’ll say, “Well, we’re just going to show them the STIs and we’re just going to scare them.” I’ve seen curricula where they say sex is like playing Russian roulette. They want to use these scare tactics, but what we’ve found is that fear doesn’t work. It doesn’t work, but building (students’) skills on how to say no, those refusal skills — it’s not easy, it’s not easy even for adults, sometimes, saying no — but building those skills and letting them practice … preparing them so that when they are in that situation, they feel more confident and they’re able to say no effectively, does work.
Another misconception is that it’s all about sex, and it’s not. A lot of these evidence-based programs are more about life skills curriculum where we’re teaching about healthy relationships and what a healthy relationship looks like. And it’s not just with romantic relationships. It can be another relationship or a friendship. It can be about not being bullied and not being called names and things like that, but we also talk about healthy relationships and what stalking may look like, or (when a partner is) trying to control you and what that may look like, whether it’s looking on your phone and trying to get your passwords to your social media, or telling you who you can hang out with, or who you can’t. That’s some of those misconceptions about sexual health, but with these evidence-based programs, you see it takes a more holistic approach a lot of times, and becomes more about teaching life skills.
Why in your words are those healthy relationship skills important for especially younger, say, middle school students, to learn?
It’s really important because we find that dating violence, intimate partner violence, happens at younger ages. It can happen in middle school, and we find that when it happens at these younger ages, they’re more likely to experience dating violence and intimate partner violence as adults as well as they get older. Even sexual violence, for example, studies have found that the majority, over 70 percent of those who experience sexual violence say that the first time they experienced it happened when they were 25 years or younger. So it’s important that they receive this type of information early so we can prevent it.
We’ve already talked a bit about the outcomes for students who have experienced evidence-based sexual health programs, but can you talk more about what, if any, academic outcomes are associated with these kinds of programs?
Every program, again, is a little different, but there’s some programs that help (students) academically, because these are life skills that they’re learning. Again, it’s not just about sex. They’re learning about setting goals and how making some decisions may impact those goals, and so it helps them in that way. We also know that kids who don’t get pregnant have higher educational attainment. So if we’re increasing the amount of kids who are abstaining from sex and decreasing those risky behaviors, they’re less likely to have an unintended pregnancy and more likely to complete school and not drop out.
We also see some of those other evidence-based programs that take more of a youth development approach as well, including things like financial literacy and job skills. Those also have been shown to help increase that educational attainment and decrease school dropout. So any program out there that helps reduce risky behaviors, and particularly any type of sexual behaviors or drugs, it always benefits the kids by helping them get that higher educational attainment and stay in school.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print.
