Sex questions deleted from teen risk survey

5-3-2010 Wisconsin:

JANESVILLE — Janesville middle and high school students took a survey last week about risky behaviors such as drug use.

But they weren’t asked about sexual activity.

Janesville school officials decided those questions should not be asked.

“The questions were more graphic than what we have given the students before, and we thought parents needed more time to view the questions and decide to opt out if that’s what they wanted to do,” Superintendent Karen Schulte said.

The Youth Risk Behavior Survey is provided online by the state Department of Public Instruction. Districts can tailor the surveys to their needs.

Students in grades 6, 8, 10 and 12 took the survey. Parents were informed ahead of time and were given the opportunity to opt out.

The full survey asks questions about sex but also ethnicity, gender, weapons, fighting, bullying, suicide, tobacco and alcohol use, exercise, relations with family and teachers and whether the student wears a bicycle helmet.

Some say knowledge is power when it comes to combating teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.

Schulte doesn’t disagree.

She said the full survey might be used at some future time, but no decision has been made.

Rock County’s teen birth rate in 2008 was 39.5 per 1,000 teens age 15-19. That’s the ninth-highest rate among Wisconsin’s 72 counties, according to the state Office of Health Information.

Among surrounding counties, the teen birth rate was 18.8 in Dane County, 25.3 in Green County and 26.9 in Walworth County. The state average was 31.3

In 2009, nearly 1,950 teen girls gave birth in Rock County.

Rock County’s sexually transmitted infections rate for teens was fourth in the state in 2008 after Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha counties.

Statewide, the rate of teens contracting sexually transmitted infections is on the rise.

Janesville administered its own survey from 1990 to 2008. Questions about sex were not a part of that survey. Schulte said injecting new questions was too much, too soon.

“The additional questions, we thought, were much more invasive of personal privacy” than in the old survey, Schulte said.

Schulte said her concern was what parents might think when their children came home and reported they took a survey that asked about oral sex, for example.

“We just thought we might get pushback from the community, so we thought, ‘We have to have more time before we start asking these questions,’” she said.

The middle school version of the state survey asks five questions in its sex section. The high school version asks 10.

The middle school survey asks whether it’s important to the student to delay sexual intercourse; whether the student has ever had sex, and if so, when was the first time; the number of sexual partners the student has had and whether a condom was used the last time the student had sex.

The high school survey also asks how many people the student has had sex with in the past three months, whether the student drank or took drugs prior to the last time she or he had sex, what pregnancy-prevention method was used the last time they had sex, whether the student has had sex with males, females or both and whether the student has had oral sex.

Marge Hallenbeck, director of at-risk and multi-cultural programs, said survey data are used to show needs when applying for grants, they help the district’s alcohol/drugs committee spot trends, and they can be used to steer curriculum changes.

Hallenbeck said the state survey is more useful than the district’s old survey. Officials had to wait months for the local results to be processed, but the online survey results will be available almost immediately.

No decision has been made about what survey to use in the future, Schulte said.

Brian Weaver, school health programs consultant at the Department of Public Instruction, said that of the districts that use the survey, about half remove the sex questions from the middle school surveys.

Weaver said he advises districts that if they think the sex questions will be too controversial, they should remove them.

But if a district scraps the survey altogether, “then you don’t have any data available,” Weaver said.

Weaver said students are told that if they don’t want to answer a particular question, they don’t have to. ..Source.. By FRANK SCHULTZ