Limya Harvey and Cydney Mumford set up a folding table a few times a month on the University of Texas-San Antonio campus to give away kits containing emergency contraceptives, condoms, and lube, or menstrual products like tampons and pads. They typically bring 50 of each type of kit, and after just an hour or two everything is gone.

The 19-year-old sophomores — Harvey is enrolled at UTSA and Mumford at Northeast Lakeview College — founded the organization  last spring. Their mission is to educate students and others in need about sexual health and connect them with free services and products packaged into kits they distribute on campus, in the community, and through their website.

“Both of us grew up rather lower-income,” Mumford said, “so there’s a soft spot as it relates to people who say, ‘Oh, I just don’t have it right now.’ That’s part of the reason we started doing this.”

Harvey and Mumford aren’t alone. A growing number of students on college campuses nationwide are stepping in to provide other students with free or low-cost emergency contraceptives, birth control, and menstrual products.

They are also pushing back against threats to their reproductive freedom since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision last year, which eliminated federal abortion protections.

Although emergency contraceptives are legal in every state, some policymakers worry that in states that ban or severely restrict abortion,  and other types of birth control may erode because of people failing to distinguish between drugs that prevent pregnancy and medications used for abortions.

“Our requests for help have quadrupled since Dobbs,” said Kelly Cleland, the executive director of the American Society for Emergency Contraception, which provides toolkits and technical assistance to help students develop what are becoming known as . Those student networks provide emergency contraceptives and  to their campuses that carry the medications and other personal health care products. The organization has worked with students .

Many types of emergency contraceptive pills are available over the counter and without age restrictions. Students who distribute them are generally not putting themselves at legal risk, especially if they ensure the products are in their original packaging and haven’t expired and refrain from providing medical advice, Cleland said. It’s like giving a friend a Tylenol, one advocate explained.

“It’s really growing and a really interesting new route for people to get what they need in trusted ways, especially in Texas and other states where there are repercussions from the Dobbs decision,” said Mara Gandal-Powers, director of birth control access at the National Women’s Law Center.

Like those of many student groups, Harvey and Mumford’s kits contain products — emergency contraceptive pills, tampons, lube, etc. — donated by nonprofits and companies. Black Book Sex Ed accepts financial donations as well and uses the money to buy items at big-box stores.

The University of Texas-San Antonio didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Across the country, at Bowie State University in Maryland, a graduate student took a different approach to improving student access to contraceptives.

What started as a class project last year for Jakeya Johnson’s master’s degree program in public administration and policy, eventually became state law.

Starting next year,  many Maryland public colleges to provide round-the-clock access to emergency contraception and develop a comprehensive plan to ensure students have access to all FDA-approved forms of birth control, plus abortion services.

As part of her project, Johnson, 28, started researching the availability of reproductive health care at Bowie State, and she quickly learned that options were somewhat limited. When she called the health center, she was told that emergency contraception was available only to students who went through counseling first and that, while the college prescribed birth control, there was no pharmacy on campus where students could fill their prescriptions. She proposed that the school install a vending machine stocked with emergency contraceptives, condoms, pregnancy tests, and other sexual health products. But college officials told her they didn’t have money for the machines. Her research showed that students at other colleges in Maryland faced similar roadblocks.

So, Johnson approached then-Del.  (D-Montgomery), now a state senator, about introducing a bill that would require schools to provide access to emergency contraceptives and other contraceptive services.

The bill, which was signed in May, requires the schools to provide the services by August 2024.

“There was definitely some pushback” from conservative legislators during the process, Johnson said. Although the final bill didn’t include requirements for transportation services or school reporting that Johnson wanted, she was heartened by the amount of support the bill received from parents and students.

In the spring, Johnson received a  from the University System of Maryland that has enabled her to work with her student health center to develop a blueprint for Bowie State that other schools can follow, she said.

“It’s something that in 2023 we shouldn’t have to be fighting for,” she said.” We should already have it.”

“The legislation was confirmation and affirmation of the direction we were headed anyway,” said Michele Richardson, director of the Henry Wise Wellness Center at Bowie State. She noted that the school is in the process of bringing to campus wellness vending machines, which will be installed by August.

But increasing access is more challenging elsewhere.

At Loyola University Chicago, a Jesuit college, members of the organization  aren’t permitted to host events on campus or reserve space in meeting rooms. The Loyola for Life group, which opposes abortion, faces no such restrictions.

While Loyola “welcomes an open exchange of ideas,” only registered student organizations that are “congruent with our values as a Jesuit, Catholic institution” can submit activity requests or reserve space on campus, said Matthew McDermott, a spokesperson for the university.

Oral contraceptives are provided only to students who need them for reasons unrelated to preventing pregnancy, and resident advisers are not permitted to distribute condoms or other forms of birth control.

“That’s where Students for Reproductive Justice comes in,” said Andi Beaudouin, 21, who for the past two years has overseen the group’s . “We were like, ‘If the university isn’t going to do it then we will.’ Everyone deserves this and we don’t need to feel embarrassed or hesitant about getting the resources that we need.”

Beaudouin and other volunteers take orders for emergency contraception by email. They package pills with two pregnancy tests and some pads and liners in case of bleeding and hand off the kits to students either on campus or nearby. In the past two years, they’ve filled orders for more than 100 kits.

When the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs, the number of requests skyrocketed, Beaudouin said. The group posted on Instagram pleading with students not to stockpile pills, because its supplies were very limited.

“People understood, but I felt really bad about it,” they said. (Beaudouin uses the pronoun they.)

Beaudouin doesn’t think university officials know that the reproductive health group distributes emergency contraceptives on campus. And Loyola for Life has picketed their off-campus condom distribution events, but it has gotten better since the reproductive health group asked them to stop, Beaudouin said.

Loyola for Life didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The national anti-abortion group Students for Life of America wouldn’t object to students distributing free pregnancy tests and menstrual products, said Kate Maloney, manager of the group’s Campaign for Abortion Free Cities. But they would object to distribution of emergency contraception, which they claim is an abortion-causing drug.

Still, the reproductive justice groups shouldn’t be prohibited from operating on campus, Maloney said. “We’re not going to say whether a group should be denied the right to exist,” she said, “because that has happened a lot to us.”

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In June 2023, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts shared with the public a draft of a new framework that will guide .

The that specify expectations for what Massachusetts students learn about sex in schools was 24 years ago, when most U.S. homes were not yet internet-connected.

The new guidelines are part of a larger framework that addresses many aspects of health, including physical education, nutrition and hygiene. They include important improvements over the 1999 version, including standards that pertain to the well-being of gender and sexual minority populations. That’s noteworthy, given that other U.S. states have recently .

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The draft Massachusetts framework has been in development since 2018 but is not yet final. After a public comment period, which is open until Aug. 28, the framework is subject to approval by the commonwealth’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and could be adopted as early as the fall of 2023.

I’m a public health researcher who . I have co-developed and tested a new sex education module for high school students in Massachusetts with funding from the National Institutes of Health, so I read the part of the framework that deals with sex education with great interest.

I’ll provide some more detail on the Massachusetts framework below, but first it is important to understand the state of sex education in the U.S.

Sex education and pornography

Many young people in the U.S are not getting the sex education that they need. Currently, only 38 U.S. states and the District of Columbia mandate any kind of sex education. As a result, it isn’t surprising that of U.S. adolescents say that they have received information about where to get birth control before having heterosexual intercourse for the first time. And the racial disparities are concerning: Black and Hispanic teens are less likely than white teens to receive education about prevention of sexually transmitted infections or HIV, or .

So where do teenagers and young adults go to get information about sex, in the absence of comprehensive sex education at school?

According to a nationally representative , young adults in the U.S. are more likely to turn to pornography than to their friends, parents, doctors or any other source. That’s a problem, because pornography isn’t designed to relay medically accurate or helpful information about sex — it’s designed to get clicks or likes, make money and entertain the viewer.

Massachusetts is not one of the states that mandates sex education. However, all public schools to teach health education. As a local control state, Massachusetts issues frameworks and guidance and allows local school districts boards to decide how to implement them. This approach will continue with the new framework once adopted.

Importantly, the new Massachusetts framework recognizes the prevalence of pornography, and it addresses other critical sex education topics for the modern world.

For example, the framework specifies that in grades 6 to 8, adolescents should learn about laws related to sexual digital imagery. This is important because otherwise they may not realize that possessing or sending nude digital photos of people younger than 18 years old is a crime even if the sender is also a minor.

The framework also suggests that adolescents should be able to analyze similarities and differences between friendships, romantic relationships and sexual relationships, and discuss various ways to show affection within each. It expects them to be able to define sexual consent and describe factors, such as drug and alcohol use, that can influence capacity to give consent. It recommends teaching strategies to help students recognize when someone is grooming or recruiting a young person for possible commercial sexual exploitation like human trafficking.

While these points are strong, I would like to see a recommendation that schools tell youth that mainstream online pornography is not a good source of information about sexual behavior.

A series of online games

Our research team, which includes , and BU , has been working on new sex education teaching materials for Massachusetts high schools for . As researchers, we endeavored to create an online sex education module that reflected the best available evidence and feedback that we got from young people.

Our teaching materials are in the form of short, online games that students engage with on their own time, and then come back to the classroom to discuss. One of the games has students order the effectiveness of 11 different contraceptive methods. Another provides them with information about ways pornography can provide unhelpful expectations about sex and sexuality. A third game invites students to act as an advice columnist to solve relationship problems for peers.

When we tested the materials with 54 teens ages 14-18 years old in Massachusetts in 2022, we found a statistically significant positive impact on a range of outcomes, from increased condom use to fewer experiences of abuse by a dating partner. We will partner with a number of Massachusetts high schools in the next several years to continue testing the impact of our module.

Reading the framework

In reading the new Massachusetts guidelines, our team noted several strengths of its approach.

First, the framework is evidence-based. In other words, the recommendations reflect the latest and best available research about how adolescents develop, learn and behave with regard to sex and sexuality.

Second, the guidance is developmentally and age-appropriate, with different recommendations for different grade levels, and with careful attention to diverse perspectives, cultural differences, and the importance of delivering material in a way that would not traumatize students.

Third, the framework encourages youths’ critical thinking, reasoning, decision-making and problem-solving.

It is my hope that Massachusetts will strengthen the guidance on pornography. If it does, the new framework will be well positioned to serve as a national model.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

Massachusetts’ sexual health curriculum remains stuck, at least on paper, in the Wild West educational landscape of 1999. But after some 24 years, and with more than a decade of pressure from advocates and a cohort of legislators, the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is getting ready to make some changes.

What those changes are remains a mystery. There are broad state standards for health education, promulgated through the department, but they were  decades ago and allow for a wide amount of leeway in school-by-school choice in what curriculum and materials to use. 

A 2018  from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s Office of Sexual Health & Youth Development found 43 percent of high school students were not taught about condoms at school and 61 percent reported not talking with a parent about preventing HIV, sexually transmitted infections, or pregnancy. While the state teen birth rate declined along with the rest of the country, the 2018 report found that sexually transmitted infections rose across age groups and especially in the 15- to 24-year-old range.

“Governor Healey supports efforts to make sure that sex education offered in Massachusetts schools is comprehensive, inclusive, medically accurate, and age appropriate,” spokesperson Karissa Hand said in a statement. “Our administration is also working with DESE to put forward a health education framework that achieves these goals.”

A DESE spokesperson confirmed the agency is at work on the framework, but did not say what the timeline is for the update. Efforts to revamp the state health standards were  before the global COVID-19 pandemic hit, which paused the process until recently. 

“Following stakeholder engagement, revisions are being reviewed by the new administration,” said education department spokesperson Jacqueline Reis. These stakeholders included experts within particular topic areas, colleagues from other state agencies that focus on public health and mental health, and advisory councils to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, Reis said.

With little to no visible movement on the DESE side for years and , lawmakers have been pushing for a plan B: setting requirements for new standards through legislation and making sure that the education department moves more quickly in the future. But that effort has also been slow going on Beacon Hill.

For a dozen years, a consistently re-filed  requiring schools that offer sexual health programming to “provide a medically accurate, age-appropriate, comprehensive sexual health education” with an emphasis on consent and acknowledging LGBTQ+ identities stalled out on Beacon Hill. For the past four years, the “Healthy Youth Act” passed the Senate only to fizzle in the House. It would not require any school to offer such a course, just ensure a baseline for the content covered.

“We would be saying that we believe in the right of young people to receive fact-based information in their sexual health education,” said Jennifer Hart of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts. The erratic landscape of sex ed programs across the state currently leaves some young people “getting incorrect information that is based in fear and stigma and shame” in their public institutions, Hart said.

Supporters say the bill is “common sense” updating to reflect a healthy and informed approach to sex education.

“Really, in my mind, I don’t understand why it’s taken this long,” said Sen. Sal DiDomenico, of Everett, who refiled the bill in the state Senate this term. “There’s no mandate here. It just says if they are teaching sex education, it has to be appropriate, medically accurate, and inclusive. I’m sometimes confused about where this controversy comes from.”

Parents, he notes, would still have the choice to opt out as they do now, receiving a letter at the start of the year giving them notice. 

Opponents of the bill and similar policies argue that exposure to these curricula will encourage sexual activity among young people and disempower parents from determining the best time and manner to educate their children about sex.

“Parents could still opt out their children. But what good would it do?” asked Mary Ellen Siegler in a  for the Massachusetts Family Institute, a non-partisan public policy organization that emphasizes Judeo-Christian values, during a prior attempt to pass the act. “With the amount of sexually explicit (and gross) material included in the curriculum, children everywhere in school would still be exposed to Comprehensive Sexuality Education material. Conversations among students are bound to sink to the level the scenarios suggest.”

The opt-out has become a friction point for LGBTQ+ advocates. Tanya Neslusan, executive director of MassEquality, said the organization is no longer part of the Healthy Youth Act coalition because the bill would allow individuals and schools to opt out.

“We’ve been dealing with anti-LGBTQ battles across the state and seen a real increase over these last few years in coordinated opt-out campaigns,” she said. The campaigns have been focused on individual parents pulling their children out of programming that discusses LGBTQ+ identities in particular, she said.

“We really are afraid that to push through the Healthy Youth Act legislation – even though it’s great legislation and it’s what we need – without a mandate in place to have sex education, that some districts will end up with no sex education at all,” she said.

MassEquality is now backing a  put forward by Rep. Marjorie Decker, of Cambridge, which mandates statewide age-appropriate and medically accurate sex education, though parents are still permitted to opt their children out of any portion of the curriculum. Though the Decker bill’s “wording around health education is a bit vaguer” and does not specifically touch on LGBTQ+ orientations or consent, it does require that sex education adhere to national standards, which covers much of the Healthy Youth Act’s priorities, Neslusan said.

Of the opt-out provision, DiDomenico said, “it’s just a matter of trying to get something passed in this space right now, and that option is important for some folks.” He added, “I would be okay with a mandate, but I have to get my colleagues to agree.”

The act would make sure the state avoids 25-year gaps between updates, at least. It requires DESE to review and update its standards to be consistent with the Healthy Youth Act at the passage of the law and then at least every 10 years afterward.

Out-of-date standards are one thing to tackle, Healthy Youth Act supporters say, but current regulations also leave a lot of discretion up to the individual schools as to the content of the health curriculum. Under the act, DESE must collect information on the sexual health programs offered by schools across the state.

Jamie Klufts, a co-chair of the Healthy Youth Act Coalition, wrote in an  that  from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention underline the need for consistent and comprehensive sex education programming.

While reported sexual assault of young women is up to almost one in five nationally, condom usage among youths is down from 60 percent in 2011 to 52 percent in 2021. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual young people experience more sexual violence than their heterosexual peers and are nearly four times more likely to report suicide attempts.

Over the decade covered by the report, the Healthy Youth Act has not come to the Massachusetts House floor for a vote.

“This means that an entire generation of young people has gone through our school system without the assurance of quality sex and relationship education that the Healthy Youth Act would provide,” Klufts and her co-authors wrote.

The state of the Commonwealth’s sex ed standards is particularly disheartening, advocates say, because in a post-Roe United States, prominent Massachusetts politicians have taken a particular pride in codifying reproductive care protections into state law but left sexual health by the wayside. 

Planned Parenthood reviewed all 50 states plus Washington D.C. and ranked their sexual health curriculum and their level of abortion protections. Massachusetts is somewhat of an outlier among states that are “protective” or “very protective” of abortion care, Hart said, because the state standards for sex ed do not require education to be medically accurate, cover birth control options, include LGBTQ+ identities, or affirm abortion access.

“Sex education is comprehensive,” Hart said, “and still there is shame and stigma around sex ed, around abortion. In Massachusetts, we have such protections for sexual reproductive health, and this is just another area where Massachusetts can grow in being a leader.”

DiDomenico said he is hopeful about the coalition’s chances this year because of Healey’s commitments to inclusive sex education, his conversations with House co-filers Rep. Jim O’Day of West Boylston and Rep. Vanna Howard of Lowell, as well as recent state action taken to shore up access to medication abortion imperiled by recent Supreme Court rulings.

House Speaker Ron Mariano is “going through the details and having conversations with members,” a spokesperson said. Mariano stood outside the State House with other elected leaders and reproductive health organizations to  for moves to protect access to medication abortion earlier this year.

Senate leadership has been enthusiastically on board with the act for years. Senate President Karen Spilka said in 2020, “There has never been a more important time to teach our youth about the benefits of having healthy relationships — and that begins with inclusive and accurate sex education. Sadly, we know all too well the consequences of unhealthy relationships, which is why it is so important we prepare our students so that they can make informed decisions.”

The Legislature’s joint Education Committee has not yet scheduled hearings for the House and Senate versions of the Healthy Youth Act or Decker’s bill.

This story was originally published at .

Exactly half have no mandate that schools teach sex education, from the Institute reveals, and only four of the 26 require curricula to cover the topic of contraception. Twenty-three allow districts to skip over consent entirely.

Restricting abortion access in a country that already limits young people’s resources for learning about sexual health is “a horrifying picture,” said Cassandra Corrado, a sex educator who works with high school and college students in Florida, where an abortion ban now is expected.

“We’re going to have a lot of people being afraid of their own bodies and we’re going to have a lot of people turning to unreliable sources of information,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Teens who receive comprehensive sex education are significantly less likely to have unwanted pregnancies than those who don’t get lessons on the topic or receive abstinence-only teachings, show. The five states with the — Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Alabama — are also among those set to outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned.

Nationwide, only 29 states and Washington, D.C. require public school students to receive any form of sex education and just 18 require such teachings to be medically accurate.

With the map of U.S. sex ed laws patchy at best, a published by Politico on Monday evening revealed that the Supreme Court appears poised to reverse the 1973 Roe decision, which guarantees federal constitutional protection of abortion rights. Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed Tuesday that the .

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” writes Justice Samuel Alito on behalf of the majority. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

If the 50-year-old ruling falls, 22 states have laws that will immediately take effect outlawing abortion, including trigger bans and clauses in their state constitutions. Analysts expect four more to ban the procedures legislatively.

Matisse Laufgraben is a rising sophomore at Indiana University Bloomington where she works as student leader promoting sexual well-being on campus with the organization . Attending school in a state that has enacted 55 abortion restrictions and bans in the past decade, paving the way for a comprehensive ban should Roe be struck down, she’s hyper-aware of the fallout for her and her peers.

“If you get pregnant, you [will] have to deal with the consequences. There’s no escape,” she told ����Ӱ��. “It takes away that freedom for women.”

Despite Laufgraben’s work to inform peers about consent and healthy relationships, there’s still a “​​scary amount of sexual assault cases and sexual violence” on campus, she said. The prospect of abortion access rolling back in her state amplifies such fears, she explained, especially for female-identifying students who are more likely to be assault victims.

“It feels like we don’t have control over what happens to our bodies. … We don’t have control over whether or not we get sexually assaulted. And then we don’t have control over whether or not we want to have the baby,” said the college student. “It really just feels like everything is turned against us.”

The state abortion bans have an inverse relationship with rules requiring comprehensive sex ed. Of the 26 states expected to enact abortion bans in the coming months, only Iowa, Tennessee and Utah mandate sexual education in school and require that lessons be medically accurate. South Carolina is the sole state among the 26 that orders schools teach sex education and also requires lessons on consent.

Meanwhile, were filed in U.S. statehouses during the first three months of 2022, including “Don’t Say Gay” laws and bans on trans-related books in school. Many of the laws would bar educators from discussing or providing students with materials involving sexual orientation and gender identity, according to the .

“It’s not a coincidence that … state abortion restrictions are getting tighter at the same time as we’re seeing more restrictions on sex education, more restrictions on trans youth and how they can engage in schools,” said Corrado.

With laws stipulating what schools staff can and can’t discuss in Florida classrooms, many of her colleagues have to walk a “fine line,” she said, in order to deliver the information that youth — especially those who identify as queer, trans or nonbinary — need for their sexual well-being.

“As sex educators, one of the conversations that we’re having all the time right now is ‘How can we … protect our careers and also still be giving people the information that they need,’ ” said Corrado.

Even though schools in her state legally must provide lessons on sex education, she said, they often give students an incomplete or even false picture. According to state law, curricula need not be medically accurate, may promote religion and must stress the importance of abstinence.

“We shouldn’t assume that students are getting [accurate] information in schools right now, because they might not be,” said Corrado.

It found that 49 percent of 1,200 respondents from around the country said schools have a responsibility to ensure students learn about the ongoing effects of slavery and racism in America while 41 percent believe schools should teach students about the nation’s history of slavery and racism — but not about race relations today. 

A full 10 percent said schools do not have a responsibility to teach anything about slavery or racism in the U.S., according to the sixth annual conducted by The McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State. 

​​The results were further broken down by other demographic factors: 79 percent of Black respondents and 77 percent of Democrats and Independents who lean Democratic believe students should, in fact, learn about the ongoing impacts of both slavery and racism. 

The teaching of both topics has been under intense fire with recently moving to prohibit or attempting to dramatically curtail discussion of race and race-related topics in the classroom, often targeting a concept called which explains how American racism has impacted a wide range of systems and institutions. 

Conservatives across the country have renewed their push for removing some texts — including the the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust graphic novel — that explain racial and ethnic discrimination. 

“The public is a little more divided than we thought,” said Craig Helmstetter, managing partner at American Public Media Research Lab, a St. Paul, Minnesota-based group that conducts independent, nonpartisan research and reporting. APM Research Lab reported the poll results and analysis.

The poll, released today, was conducted between Nov. 30 and Dec. 7, 2021. The data was collected online by and has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points. 

In addition to questions on race, it also addresses the degree to which people believe parents should influence their child’s education — another current flashpoint — and the teaching of evolution and sex education.

“There are an awful lot of people who think parents ought to have a substantial amount of influence even though they have no statutory or legal role in setting curriculum,” said Eric Plutzer, a political science professor at Penn State and the McCourtney Institutes’s director of polling. “That was especially pronounced among Republicans and social conservatives.”

Another group, he said, believes these decisions should be left up to people with expertise, including teachers, because of their subject matter knowledge and classroom experience, and state agencies, which have long crafted curriculum standards.

“That view was expressed by Democrats and social liberals,” Plutzer said.

The biggest gap between those who thought parents should have the most sway and those who thought teachers should be more influential was on the question of COVID safety, with 46 percent saying parents should have a great deal of influence in that area and 28 percent saying educators should.

The poll considered respondents’ gender, age, race, income and political party, among other factors. It also accounted for religion, including affiliation and frequency of worship attendance.

While 90 percent of respondents said schools should teach scientific evolution, half think it should be combined with the teaching of biblical perspectives about creation. A full 10 percent said schools should teach only biblical perspectives.

More than a quarter of those surveyed said they were born again or Evangelical Christians, and their distinctiveness from those of other faiths shows up in several ways:

Just 12 percent believed schools should teach evolution only as compared to 58 percent of other respondents. A full 66 percent of Democrats and those who lean Democratic held the position as compared to 25 percent of those who were Republican or Republican-leaning.

Helmstetter said policymakers should not discount the role of religion in America.

“Although there is a long, steady decline in the number of people attending church on a regular basis, it is still an important and significant part of people’s lives,” he said. “We should acknowledge and pay attention to it. There are some pretty big divisions across all of these questions, specifically as it relates to people being identified as born again Christians.”

And while 75 percent of respondents believe sexual education for teens should include the dangers of sexually transmitted infections as well as contraception, a majority said they believe parents of school children should have “a great deal of influence” on how sex education is taught. That number includes 72 percent of Republicans, among them Independents who lean Republican, 66 percent of born again Christians and 63 percent of those age 65 or older.

Nearly half of born again Christians think sex education for teens should stop at teaching about STIs and abstinence: 37 percent of Republicans, including independents who lean Republican, held this same view.

Just 22 percent of respondents said local school boards and state departments of education should have significant influence over the teaching of sexual education, an opinion slightly more common among Black Americans and Democrats as compared to other groups.

The survey included a number of open-ended questions that allow respondents to explain their views in their own words: A 63-year-old white woman from Georgia, who does not identify as a born again Christian or Evangelical, said school boards and educators should have a great deal of influence on the teaching of sex education.

“Local teachers have a rapport with students and can build a trust with them,” said the woman, who identified herself as Republican.

Plutzer, considering the division on so many issues, said schools looking to make big decisions without including parents might be considered out of touch.

“There is already eroding respect for expert judgement in many parts of our society including education,” he said, adding a failure to include parents would only make adopting best practices more difficult. “It doesn’t mean the recommendations of those experts is wrong, but it means that if they are resisted, even a good recommendation is not going to be implemented well.”