Health teachers explain curriculum at meeting

In the wake of recent parental concern over an adolescent sexuality conference in Seaside, Wednesday night's school board meeting promised to offer a lively exchange regarding sex education curriculum.

Julie Patton, health teacher at Sisters Middle School, and Heather Johnson, health teacher at Sisters High School were prepared with copies of their board-approved curriculum, and hand-out copies of the surveys, questionnaires, and reports that they use in class.

Though there was a packed house at the meeting not a single critic showed up to question the program.

The conference became a focus of statewide controversy after a KOIN 6 News story describing some questionable materials that were present at the 2014 conference.

Board chair Don Hedrick said, "Heather and Julie are here because one guy made some comments at a convention that you attended and it got blown up by KOIN TV. We asked them (Heather and Julie) to come here to talk to us about what actually happens in our schools, because I don't think what we heard on the TV was accurate."

"I talked to Rob Saxton, state deputy superintendent of schools," said Sisters schools Superintendent Jim Golden. "I asked him to further clarify what happened here. What happened here is, in my opinion, guilt by association. I say to those in the community that did not ever contact anybody to find out the facts, shame on you."

Golden then read a letter from Saxton into the record.

Saxton's letter said in part, "In light of the recent coverage of the Adolescent Sexuality Conference, I wanted to provide you with the following information. The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) looked into what took place at the Adolescent Sexuality Conference last April. We have found that the pamphlets were available from vendors to anyone who asked for them. We believe some of the pamphlets were not appropriate for school-age students.

"We have also reviewed the content delivered by the presenters at the conference and believe their information was appropriate. There have been reports this was not the case, but we found that the reports made about the presentations of inappropriate materials were based on events that did not actually take place."

See the online version of this article at http://www.nugget

news.com for the full text of Saxton's letter.

Golden continued, "For the record, Heather and Julie were at the conferences. Never were any children from Sisters School District at the conferences. Julie and Heather are two of the better teachers that I have ever had the privilege to work with. What I would like them to talk about now is what we do, not what innuendo and rumor say we do."

Copies of state K-12 health education standards were given to the board and made available to anyone in the room. Also available were copies of all the data sheets and questionnaires the teachers use in teaching their health classes.

Patton and Johnson have both been teaching health in Sisters for more than 20 years.

Johnson said, "I hope that we can look at the two different situations. We have a conference that we get to go to, and then there is what we teach in the classroom.

"This particular conference has been in place for 38 years," continued Johnson. "We were fortunate enough to win a grant for the last three years in a row. This is by far the best conference that I ever attend."

Speaking to the teaching materials Johnson said, "Our curriculum has been reviewed and approved by the board. We had parent meetings to review the material, but they were really poorly attended so we stopped having them."

With 1,100 students in the district, the parent nights to review the curriculum before it was adopted drew only 20 parents representing only about 15 families.

Patton said, "At the middle school level I get a lot more parent input than Heather does at the high school. I get lots more questions that are 'I've heard you do this. I've heard you teach that.' I'm just really hoping that our community will learn to come to the source. I feel like it was a slap in the face after all the work we have done to put this program together. It is interesting that none of those people are here to speak up for their half of it."

Johnson and Patton requested that all of their materials be posted on the school district website so that parents can easily review the materials at their leisure.