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Mom live tweets criticism of son's sex-ed class

Lori Grisham
USA TODAY Network
An author visited her son's class and criticized the sex-ed lessons via Twitter.

A parent sat in on her son's high school sex-ed class and live tweeted criticism of the abstinence-focused lesson.

Her tweets gained attention online and have started a broader conversation about such education.

"The whole lesson here is 'sex is part of a terrible lifestyle. Drugs, unemployment, failure to finish school — sex is part of the disaster,'" Alice Dreger, an author and historian at Northwestern University School of Medicine, tweeted during the class.

Dreger visited the Michigan classroom at East Lansing High School at her son's request, she told USA TODAY Network via phone.

"He was frustrated by what they were teaching and he wanted me to see it for myself," Dreger said.

Dreger found his concerns to be valid because the teachers linked sex to purely negative consequences and used a "shame-based" approach, she said.

"I feel like raising my hand and saying, 'Can I tell my sexual history, which involves a lot of pleasure before and during marriage?'," she tweeted.

The lesson would also leave girls who had already had sex feeling shameful or unwanted, she said.

"I absolutely believe in counseling people to wait until they are ready," Dreger said. "But that is different from abstinence."

East Lansing High School Principal Coby Fletcher issued a statement Thursday saying abstinence is only a portion of the overall sex education program, Judy Putnam from the Lansing State Journal reported.

"Abstinence-based instruction teaches that abstinence is the only way to be completely safe, but the curriculum also reviews contraception choices. This parent attended on a day where abstinence was being taught,'' he said in the statement.

However, the particular class Dreger visited was taught by an outside group connected to an organization that counsels pregnant women to avoid abortion. The school hires Sexually Mature Aware Responsible Teens, or SMART, to teach sex education, according to Putnam's reporting. SMART is connected to the Pregnancy Services of Greater Lansing.

The lesson did talk about contraception, and specifically condoms, but focused on the instances when they failed, according to Dreger.

The most successful sexual education programs take a comprehensive approach and focus on healthy relationships in addition to biology, Heather Boonstra, the director of public policy at the Guttmacher Institute told USA TODAY Network. The Guttmacher Institute researches reproductive health domestically and abroad.

"If you're only talking about failures and how (condoms) don't work and how they cause promiscuity ... that is certainly not the information that young people need in order to use these products when they become sexually active and that's a real shame," Boonstra said.

Dreger's visit ended with some profanity being said to the teachers, which left her banned from the school except for certain events.

Fletcher called Dreger's actions disappointing in a statement to Putnam.

"I support the appropriate expression of a plurality of viewpoints; however, I am very concerned by the utter lack of civility I see conveyed in the tweets and the behavior the tweeter admits to exhibiting in the classroom. This is not representative of the conduct we expect to see adults model for our students."

Dreger told USA TODAY Network she does not regret using the language, but she does regret that it gave the principal a reason to say she was inappropriate.

"The principal said, I shouldn't say (the f word) in front of children, but that's part of the problem. These aren't children, they are 14 to 19 years old."

Contributing: Judy Putnam, Lansing State Journal

Follow @lagrisham on Twitter

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