The Rochester school district will begin making condom availability free to high school students beginning next Monday, February 25.
The new condom availability program, which the Rochester school board approved last year, requires school nurses to distribute the condoms. Parents and guardians were notified by mail last October. Parents agree to allow their child to participate in the program, unless they sign and return an opt-out form.
Students must complete a health course that includes AIDS education as part of their regular high-school curriculum. And students who receive condoms must receive health guidance from the school nurse, which includes information on safe sex, sexually transmitted diseases including HIV, and pregnancy prevention.
They must also learn how to safely use a condom.
Some parents strongly opposed the new program when it was presented last year. But school officials cited numerous studies that support implementing a condom availability program in high schools because it will reduce sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancies.
Rochester’s teen birth rate is nearly double the national average. And a report released in 2010 showed that 45 percent of new HIV cases in Monroe County were among young adults under 25.
This article appears in Feb 20-26, 2013.
We condemn these children to a lifetime of ignorance and failure. They can’t read, but by the time they drop out they will be well versed in every imaginable form of filth and depravity, and we count that as success.
These government-run schools no longer are merely sick jokes, no longer merely a scandal. They are instruments of evil.
I always amazed by these insights into the minds of Conservatives. The same individuals who claim that handing a 12 year old a gun and teaching him/her to kill animals is a benefit to society are the ones claiming that handing a condom to a 16 year old is “evil”.
@MJN — That’s a bit of a non-sequitur, and you have absolutely no way of knowing my attitude toward hunting, but I’ll bite. First of all, the basic principle would be the same if a family held a strong conviction about the immorality of hunting, but government personnel, facilities and resources were being used to teach their children to hunt. More importantly, however, there is simply no moral equivalence. The fact is that sexual immorality destroys lives, families, communities, and societies — hunting doesn’t.
j.a.m. – I’m plesesd to see that you do not support arming young children and brainwashing them into thinking that blasting small animals into bloody ribbons is a “sport”.
As to your belief that schools passing out condoms somehow violates your moral standards let me ask what is it that you find so “evil” about the practice. The fact that it reduces teenage pregnancies? Or the fact that it reduces the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases?
It can’t be that you believe that that condom distribution ignites teenage hormones and sends otherwise chaste young adults off to engage in sensual experimentation? After all, wouldn’t that be as logical as claiming that handing a rifle to a teenager will automatically turn him into the next Adam Lanza?
@MJN — The point is that in a free society the state simply has no business intruding into private family matters. A secondary point is that schools are for education, not fornication. This phony sideshow is cynically calculated to distract from the reality that government schools are such disastrous failures.
j.a.m. – Very libertarian of you (although equating a local school district headed by a local administrator and governed by a local board of education made up of your friends and neighbors with an amorphous and anonymous, Big Brother “state” is a bit of a stretch)
That aside, since you believe that the state “simply has no business intruding into private family matters” you must believe that abortion, the ultimate “family matter” should be left exclusively up to the individuals involved without any interference by the state.
@MJN — Sure, if it did not involve directly, intentionally and avoidably depriving a perfectly innocent human being of her right to life, the defense of which is the first and irreducible duty of a civilized society.
@MJN — P.S. If you maintain that government schools are not state actors, that means we can put God back in the classroom and tell the ACLU to pound sand. Maybe there is hope after all.
j.a.m….NOW I understand what you’re saying ! When that Big Bad State agrees with your personal moral views then your previous statement that it, “simply has no business intruding into private family matters” suddenly no longer applies and its intervention is welcomed. But when that same state introduces measures which offend you, then it suddenly becomes “evil” and needs to hit the road.
A very convenient philosophy…if a tad hypocritical.
@MJN — Rubbish. I am for total separate of school and state. And you will be, too, unless you want to be found guilty of that same charge of which you wrongly accuse me.
j.a.m. – Given that your definition of the “state” includes public schools I’m unclear how you can claim to be for “total separation of church and state” while attempting to impose your moral (i.e. religious) values on the rest of us. Particularly on the students in what you amusingly and incorrectly refer to as those evil “government schools”.
By the way, you still haven’t explained why your statement that, “the state simply has no business intruding into private family matters” does not apply to legislative or judicial attempts to legalize or criminalize abortion.
“Rubbish” is a fine characterization of the right-wing drivel that j.a.m. regularly dispenses at this site: the smearing of the late George McGovern, on his death in October; the characterization of our President’s inauguration as “totalitarian”; the pretending that public good is somehow evil; or some bogus headline two weeks ago that j.a.m. couldn’t answer. This just in, j.a.m.: America has rejected your decrepit ideology. And 1851 just called, and they want their outdated beliefs back (like the worthiness of public education, just like the rest of the civilized world).