Center
It’s STARS night at Center High School/Middle School. In a classroom filled with seventh- and eighth-graders and some parents, 13-year-old Kristi Martinez reads an essay that explains what she has learned about Self-control, Trust, Abstinence, Responsibility and Self-respect.
“Saving sex for marriage can strengthen family values,” Kristi reads. “You can model positive values not just based on sex.”
Her presentation is followed by the “Cracker Test,” where one girl and two boys eat 10 saltines at once and try not to take a drink of water for five minutes.
This shows that “even though you are pressured to do something, you can wait,” explains Marina Ruyball, the 14-year-old mistress of ceremonies.
In this small town in the San Luis Valley, youngsters have traditionally not waited.
The latest teen pregnancy rate is 37 per 1,000 population. That’s 12 per 1,000 more than the state average, said sex education coordinator Katrina Ruggles, but the lowest in Center’s recent history.
When Ruggles brought abstinence- based sex ed here five years ago, the teen pregnancy rate was 53 per 1,000. The Center program, funded with a federal grant that allows no “promotion or demonstration” of contraception, will be the only abstinence-based curriculum allowed in Colorado state under a new state sex-ed bill.
Ruggles battled hard to have her program opted out. She took students to Denver to meet with the new science-based curriculum’s sponsor, Aurora Rep. Nancy Todd. It’s not just that Center could lose its three-year, $65,000-a-year federal grant if it adopts the state’s new requirements. It’s that Ruggles, a former domestic violence and sex assault therapist, believes in the program she runs.
Most importantly, the kids believe.
Damaris Hernandez, 14, says she has been taught about reproduction and contraception in health class and STARS. The program, she says, “shows you how to use protection, and it shows you the consequences after you get pregnant” – without promotion or demonstration.
In-school health classes disseminate plenty of science. Marina Ruyball can recite stats on the sexually transmitted disease chlamydia like a champ.
Ruggles says her program is not about limiting information, and refuses to judge kids who become sexually active. She sometimes refers them to public health authorities or Planned Parenthood. But she’s unrepentant about her emphasis: “Abstinence from sexual activity – not just intercourse – until marriage.”
So she focuses on things like “refusal skills,” defined by 12-year-old Jesse Wright as “When you feel real uncomfortable, you just say, ‘Stop, I don’t really want to do this anymore.”‘
Reference books in the small office Ruggles shares with a guidance counselor include such titles as “Questions Kids Ask About Sex” and “Pornified,” a treatise on sexualized modern culture. In Center, practice met theory.
“I was coaching middle-school basketball here,” Ruggles said. “And one of my 12-year-olds got pregnant.”
It wasn’t the first middle-school pregnancy in Center. It may not be the last. But there hasn’t been one since abstinence-based sex ed kicked in.
That is how sex-education programs should be judged – smart choices by young people. Ruggles teaches decision-making on a daily basis.
“Where kids are brought up in a culture where you are the low man on the pole, you don’t learn to assert your rights and act in your best interest,” she said.
The highlight of Monday night’s gathering was a student-produced dating game. Among the questions asked of male contestants was this: “Can you be intimate without pressing me into having sex?”
It fit into the program at Center. Ruggles says it should be everywhere.
“Sex,” she said, “is not an isolated act in our culture. I want my kids to have a full set of skills.”
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1771, jspencer@denverpost.com or blogs.denverpost.com/spencer.
