Arkansas needs a more robust sexual health education landscape in order to reduce the state’s high rates of teenage pregnancy and births, a coalition of advocates for children’s health and wellbeing asserted in a report published Wednesday.

The report from Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families includes several policy recommendations to “move Arkansas into an age-appropriate and evidence-based continuum of sexual health education.”

AACF formed the coalition in 2022 after releasing data that showed 28 of every 1,000 Arkansas teenagers had given birth, almost twice the national average of 15 per 1,000 teenagers. Only 22% of teenage pregnancies were planned, .

“Through our research for that report, we found that teenagers aren’t any more sexually active here than they are in other states,” last week’s report states. “The key difference is access to contraceptives, especially the most effective kind, and lack of information because sexual health education isn’t required in Arkansas.”

says that schools teaching sex education “shall include instruction in sexual abstinence, and no funds shall be utilized for abortion referral.”

Within the confines of the law, schools can take an “abstinence-plus” approach, meaning “a curriculum that builds off a foundation of abstinence education but can also include more medically accurate and evidence-based approaches,” AACF’s report states.

A 2017 survey by the found nearly 85% of Arkansas’ 262 public school districts taught some form of abstinence, including having students sign virginity pledges, while 34 districts said they didn’t teach sex education at all.

AACF hopes to gather more recent data on schools’ sex education curricula in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Olivia Gardner, AACF’s education policy director.

“I know anecdotally from this work that lots of Arkansans would like to see changes within the system,” Gardner said. “They would like to see things happening at school, and they don’t feel comfortable having those conversations at home.”

The coalition’s recommendations include, but are not limited to:

Creating new requirements for school-based sex education “to include more medically accurate information, including opportunities to teach ‘abstinence plus’ curricula”;“Including parents and medical providers as important sources of sexual health information and abuse prevention”;Supporting the expansion of sexual violence prevention programs;Supporting existing out-of-school programs that provide sexual health educationIncluding menstruation in sex education and making feminine hygiene products more accessible;Creating a nonprofit focused on improving sexual health education.

The report proposes an eight-year timeline for enacting the recommendations, with the first few years meant to be “baby steps,” Gardner said.

Members of the coalition behind the report agree that a multi-pronged, collaborative approach is necessary to put the recommendations into action.

“Sexual health in general literally affects everybody throughout their entire life,” said Katie Clark, a member of the coalition and the founder of the Arkansas Period Poverty Project. “It’s literally why we’re all here, and in order to address it, we need to talk about all these different issues and make legislators see that [better sex education] is something that will positively affect Arkansans for years to come.”

‘Ignoring it is worse’

Teenage parents are less likely to complete high school and college, which limits their economic opportunities in a state with an already high poverty rate, Gardner said.

Babies born to teenage girls are more likely to be premature or underweight, which can create lifelong health problems. According to AACF, 9.5% of all babies in Arkansas were born with low birth weights in 2021.

Additionally, Arkansas has the nation’s highest maternal mortality rate and the third highest infant mortality rate, according to the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement. Elected officials from both parties, , have expressed support for bolstering the state’s maternal and infant health care infrastructure.

While advocates agree that medically accurate sex education will help address these issues, there has been little support for sex education policies in the state Legislature in recent years. Senate Minority Leader Greg Leding, D-Fayetteville, introduced to require “age- and developmentally appropriate” and “medically accurate and complete” sex education in K-12 public schools, but the bill did not advance.

Lawmakers from both parties were receptive to the portion of the bill regarding education about safe and healthy dating practices, Leding said in an interview.

“It was really when we got into more explicit education regarding safe sexual practices that we met resistance,” he said.

Most people can agree that reducing and preventing unsafe behaviors is important, but advocates are often met with unease when discussing how to broach such topics with teenagers, said Natalie Tibbs, executive director of the Children & Family Advocacy Center in Northwest Arkansas.

“Ignoring it is worse, so it’s about finding that balance of providing age-appropriate education that is empowering and therefore creating prevention, not curiosity,” Tibbs said. “The reality is, our kids are curious anyway, they’re talking to each other, and do we really want our children learning about it from their peers who don’t have it right, or do we want them learning from teachers?”

Tibbs is a member of AACF’s sexual health education coalition and works in child abuse prevention and victim advocacy. She said teachers should receive annual training that helps them identify and report signs of child maltreatment; state law requires educators to complete this training every four years.

Both Leding’s 2021 bill and AACF’s report emphasize teaching young people about healthy relationships and consent. Tibbs agreed that this is important to prevent both child abuse and teenage pregnancy.

“We don’t see a significantly high pregnancy rate as it relates to child abuse, but it is there, so anytime we talk about sex education, we want to make sure there’s a piece of education that relates to abuse,” Tibbs said. “…We don’t want to assume that all pregnancies are consensual.”

Legislative approaches

Rep. Aaron Pilkington, R-Knoxville, said he next year legislation similar to another failed 2021 bill, which would exempt feminine hygiene products from state sales tax.

Arkansas remains one of 21 states that continue to tax period products, despite exempting other health-related products. According to the state , the tax costs menstruating Arkansans over $1 million per year.

Schools are not required to provide period products to students, which can lead them to miss school while menstruating or develop health problems from using other methods such as articles of clothing to stanch the bleeding, Clark said.

This highlights why menstruation should be part of sexual health education, she said, and many Arkansans have told her they did not learn about menstruation in school.

“If they don’t have the proper education, the words, the ways to describe it, they can’t educate their daughters well,” Clark said. “When people hear ‘sex education,’ they think intercourse and that’s it, but children and teens need to know what’s normal and not normal so they can ask questions.”

A proposed ballot measure to eliminate the tax on feminine hygiene products and diapers to make this year’s November ballot. The ballot question committee, of which Clark is chair, to the attorney general’s office Monday, seeking approval to start gathering voters’ signatures to put the measure on the 2026 ballot.

Leding said he and other Democrats hope to reintroduce legislation about sex education in a future legislative session.

“I don’t think anybody, regardless of party, can look at the situation in Arkansas and not believe that we need to do much more,” he said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com. Follow Arkansas Advocate on and .

“That moment is something you always remember,” says Nicole Lynn Lewis, founder of , a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that supports teen parents in getting a college degree. Lewis got pregnant in high school and clearly remembers the moment those little pink lines on the pregnancy test hit her life like a lightning bolt.

“Particularly for teen parents,” she says, “you remember where you were, the circumstances and how you felt knowing you would be forever in a different category from what you had imagined for your life.”

Not every teen facing those circumstances uses that experience to create a national organization to address the needs of young people in the same situation. Lewis did.

“In that moment, if someone were to have told me I was going to be CEO and a founder of a nonprofit organization, I never would have believed them. As a high school student staring at a positive pregnancy test, I was overwhelmed even by what I might achieve in the near term.

“Would I be able to provide basic needs for this child? Was I going to be able to go to college myself? In the moment, I had no concept of what the future could hold for me.”

Going through college as a young mother, she found every day a 24-hour struggle to stay on top of her studies while paying the rent, putting food on the table and being the best mom she could be.

“When I got to the (William & Mary) graduation stage four years later, it was clear to me that I had made it for a reason,” she says. “I knew that my story was rare, but I didn’t know how rare. It wasn’t until I graduated from college and started looking into the statistics around how many teen moms actually get a college degree that I understood. And I knew that I had been through everything for a reason, that my story could benefit other people.”

Those statistics were daunting in the early 2000s when Lewis graduated, and they remain so now. Fewer than 2 percent of teen mothers earn a college degree before age 30, and more than half of all parenting college students leave school without a degree — but often with mountains of debt they incurred in their attempt to improve their lives.

Lewis began to realize that she might be the right person to launch an organization to turn her story into action. But first, she had some work to do.

“I didn’t have a playbook for starting a nonprofit organization, so I immersed myself in as much information as I could about the nuts and bolts of a nonprofit startup,” she says. “By this time, I had worked for several nonprofits so without doing so consciously, I had given myself a training ground on nonprofit work. I picked the brains of every founder I had met in my professional network, asking them what they wished they had known when they first got started, what lessons they had learned and what advice they had for me as I embarked on this adventure.”

Growing an Organization with Equity at Its Heart

Brick by brick, Lewis built Generation Hope, which works directly with young parents in college, surrounding these scholars with what Lewis knows is needed, based on her own experience. The organization provides mentoring, tuition assistance, a peer community and other wraparound services, as well as an early childhood program, Next Generation Academy, that provides literacy, academic and social-emotional supports that enable the scholars’ children to enter kindergarten ready to thrive.

Beyond providing support to individual families, however, Generation Hope works with higher education professionals, policymakers and practitioners to drive systemic change for the one in five college students today who are parents. Of those, 40 percent feel isolated on campus, which has a direct effect on their college completion rates. Many higher education institutions are not designed for students who are parents and many have an out-of-touch idea of the realities these students face.

“I talk to people every day who work in higher education,” Lewis says. “I share the statistic that one in five undergraduate students are parenting — almost a quarter of all undergraduate students are caring for dependents while going to school every day — and for many of these educators, it’s the first time they’ve heard this. It’s a significant population of our students, but an invisible one that has fallen under the radar of most people working in higher education.”

She adds, “When you think of the average college student, you’re not thinking about them having a little one that they’re caring for every day.”

Recognizing the need for data to help colleges and universities understand that parenting students are a substantial part of their student body, Generation Hope works with the institutions to establish methodologies for collecting the data on their students’ parenting status. Without this information, Lewis says, schools are flying blind to the lived experience and needs of their students.

“What we know is that data leads to investments, it leads to supports, it leads to services, it leads to policy. If we don’t measure this data, it’s easy to say, ‘Well, we don’t need that child care solution. We don’t need to ensure that we have lactation spaces that students and faculty can access. We don’t need policies that ensure that professors are supportive and inclusive of parenting students. So, one of the first things we have to do is make this population visible, and that happens with data.”

Generation Hope’s website offers for educators and advocates to support parenting students and eliminate barriers to opportunity for this population that is often so invisible in higher education.

Racial equity is at the heart of Generation Hope’s work as it champions antiracist strategies and policies aimed at the racial disparities that exist at all levels of American society. One arena where this disparity is particularly glaring is in the uneven representation of Black parents in the student loan debt crisis. Black parents hold more student debt than parents or nonparents in any other racial or ethnic group, Lewis says, borrowing an average of $18,100 for college compared with the $13,500 among all students. More than a third of Black college students are parents, and nearly half of all Black female undergraduates are mothers.

“We know that student parents as a group have higher amounts of debt than other student groups,” she says. “The cost of going to college is higher for this population, factoring in the cost of child care, the cost of living for not just the parent but a family. Many student parents can’t live on campus, so they pay for transportation that on-campus students don’t have to pay for.” A Generation Hope found that 82 percent of its student parents reported annual household incomes below $30,000.

Generation Hope provides each of its scholars with up to $2,400 in tuition assistance for up to six years, with an additional $1,000 available each year for emergencies such as car repair or groceries. It provides students with coaches who can help them understand and take advantage of financial aid and has developed relationships with the financial aid offices at more than 20 higher-education institutions in the Washington, DC, area that enable staff to advocate for Generation Hope’s scholars when the need arises. The organization also assists with child care costs, and covers fees and books for students as needed.

Community Support

Another remarkable way Generation Hope supports its students is by surrounding them with a readymade community that connects them with needed resources, and helps with basic needs such as diapers, school supplies, and gas cards. These Resource Families, which can be actual families or families created by a group of friends, coworkers, or colleagues — meet their scholar families throughout the year with group dinners (childcare provided) to break bread together, talk about parenting challenges, and provide a network of support for whatever the scholars are dealing with.

Now in its 13^th year, Generation Hope has demonstrated the practicality of its philosophy that student parents can make it—and alter both their own and their families’ futures—if they’re given what they need for success. The statistics speak volumes: 61 percent of Generation Hope Scholars earn a degree within 6 years, on par with all U.S. college students; 89 percent are employed full time and/or enrolled in a graduate studies program within six months of graduating; 100 percent of Next Generation Academy children scored “on track” on measures for social-emotional development after two years in the academy. Since its founding, Generation Hope has provided over $1 million in tuition assistance. Its six-year graduation rate for Black students is 52 percent — 8 percent higher than the national average.

The organization has now expanded to New Orleans, the next step in its strategic plan on its way to creating a world in which young parents, student parents and their children have every opportunity to succeed. Lewis said her vision is to create transformation across higher education but also to educate people to see this population differently and to create a mindset change regarding the issues they face.

Lewis points out that despite the barriers and challenges, student parents are highly motivated to earn college degrees and broaden the economic possibilities for their families. Her work has shown that they can do that if they have advocates and champions giving them the emotional and material support they need. Her life, as well as the organization she created, are living proof that it can be done. Her memoir, “,” tells the story. She now holds a bachelor’s, a master’s and an honorary doctorate, and sits on the board of trustees of Trinity Washington University. She is married, and together she and her husband are raising their five children.

It’s a life that could inspire big dreams for other young people staring at those two pink stripes—and a call to action for the rest of us to help them achieve those dreams.

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 ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

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 ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. “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.

At a meeting Friday, the Texas State Board of Education officially refused to recommend three health textbooks, including two books mentioned in this report. Board members voted along party lines to reject the middle school textbooks from LessonBee, Inc. and Human Kinetics that include sex education, with opposition citing content about masturbation and abortion, insufficient attention to abstinence or a lack of constituent support. A third health textbook for elementary school failed on a 6-6 tie. 

The culture wars keep coming in Texas, and the latest one involves sex, textbooks, and the LGBTQ experience. 

On Tuesday the State Board of Education will decide whether proposed textbooks that include content on gender identity and sexual orientation will make their way into the backpacks and laptops of children in Texas and across the country. 

Both sides are gearing up, the latest in a series of polarizing fights in Texas schools, which recently included school mask mandates, teaching about systemic racism and library books with sexual content. Just last week, Governor Greg Abbott wanted against educators offering “pornographic” books to students after pointing out two .

Now, after last year’s approval of new state standards for health classes, the board must approve new textbooks—and that’s where the new battlefront is.    

“Gay people can get married today; you can’t fire LGBTQ people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity,” said Dan Quinn, a spokesman for Texas Freedom Network, a left-leaning social justice group. 

While much has changed in the last few decades, he fears, “textbook adoptions in Texas have not.”

Conservative activists and parents have issues with all five of the health textbooks the board must approve, but are particularly focused on two for middle schoolers, saying they go too far by “normalizing” sexual activity, questioning gender identity and going beyond the new state standards. 

State law now requires parents to opt-in their children to lessons on sex education. Parents groups, like the Tarrant County Chapter of Moms for Liberty, a right-leaning organization focused on preserving parental rights, argue they want to be the ones instilling morals about sex to their children. They say the new textbooks would rob them of that right. 

“The attitude of devaluing family and oversexualizing education is detrimental to children, even adults, as well as harmful to society,” said Mary Lowe, Moms for Liberty Tarrant County chair.

This base has been galvanized. Loud groups of parents are fuming about what their children are being taught about systemic racism and, using that frustration as a road map, Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race by making critical race theory and schools key issues in his campaign.  

Red meat topics like inappropriate sexual content in schools are ripe for conservative Texas Republican politics ahead of the crowded March 1 GOP primary elections, said Rice University political science professor Mark Jones. 

In addition, political attacks like Abbott’s fit the narrative that liberal school boards are dropping the ball when it comes to educating the country, he added. And those are the people Abbott wants to show up at the primary election, he said.  

“It’s not what do average Texans think. It’s what does the average Republican primary voter think,” said Jones. When it comes to teaching about sex, he said, it’s “that nothing should be taught or the bare minimum.” 

Textbooks and Standards

Up until last year, the state’s teaching standards for health and sex ed hadn’t changed since 1997. After more than a year of public hearings and panels, the State Board of Education updated the standards in 2020, with the most significant change requiring seventh and eighth-grade students , including condoms and other forms of contraception. The new standards go into effect in August 2022. 

Progressive advocates urged board members to add topics like abortion, consent, gender identity and sexual orientation to the mandatory curriculum, but the heavily conservative 15-member board declined.

When it comes to high school, sex education is optional. Many schools don’t offer sex ed at all. State law requires those that do teach sex ed present abstinence as the preferred choice to all sexual activity, encouraging abstinence until marriage. 

A teacher can go further and offer an “abstinence plus” curriculum, but must devote more attention to abstinence from sexual activity than any other behavior.  

On Tuesday, the elected board will take an initial vote to recommend textbooks school districts could buy that cover the new standards. A final vote is expected Friday. 

How the final vote will play out is unclear. Several conservative members of the board who voted on the standards in 2020 have since left the policy-making body, replaced by Republicans who skew toward the center. Advocates for comprehensive sex education hope the shift will mean the two textbooks that teach beyond the standards will be approved as is.

Textbook publishers are not bound to those standards and will try to provide content they believe makes their books attractive to school districts in Texas and across the country. While waning, with more than five million students in Texas public schools, the lone star state makes up a giant share of the national textbook market and continues to have outsize influence on content. 

But parents like Lowe and advocates like Mary Elizabeth Castle believe the books violate the standards.

“The fact that so much public input and agreement among the board went into the standards, it would be transparent and the right thing to do to have the books aligned with the standards,” said Castle, senior policy advisor for Texas Values, an organization dedicated to preserving conservative family values.

While parents can yank their students out of sex ed instruction, groups like Texas Values last year convinced the board to keep LGBTQ content out of the standards and is frustrated it’s still showing up in textbooks.

In the textbook by Human Kinetics, Castle said the text uses two students engaging in sexual activity as an example in a lesson, and in another case has students question whether their gender identity is similar to the one they are assigned at birth. The other textbook, by LessonBee, Inc., includes a text message conversation about ejaculation and arousal.

Advocates for stronger sex ed say the textbooks are needed because students want medically accurate and age-appropriate information about sex.

“We want young people to be able to engage in sexual activity if and when they feel comfortable to do so, when they feel they have all the information they need to make that decision for themselves and for their future,” said Gabrielle Doyle, state partnership coordinator for Sex Ed for Social Change, a group in favor of the textbooks.

Texas Leads in Repeated Teen Births 

What to teach students in school, particularly when it comes to sex, is a touchy subject in Texas. The state has some of the highest . A baby is born to a teen mother every 23 minutes in Texas, according to Jen Biundo, director of policy and data at the Texas Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. And Texas is the top state in the country for repeated teen births. 

Texas has historically opted to promote abstinence among teenagers to reduce teen pregnancies. 

Despite whether more in-depth teaching about sex ed could be beneficial, Jones, the political science professor, said Republicans have little political incentive to encourage it. 

As a Republican, said Jones, “you’re not going to win any votes in an election by pushing a more progressive agenda on sex ed.”