On May 5, local League Health Issues Team listened as Kim Niederhausen, Director of Health Services at Bellingham Public Schools, described a new curriculum. We heard how the new curriculum, Comprehensive Sexual Health Education (CSHE), and its standards and requirements, is being launched in the BPS system.
BPS has always taught sexual health education. However, SB5395 required a statewide new curriculum with standards and requirements to be implemented in the 2022-2023 school year. As you can imagine, this was a huge undertaking—aligning current practices to new requirements and Learning Standards for K-12, selecting new materials, creating a plan for CSHE instruction for each grade, training staff, developing feedback systems for youth and their parents, and outlining evaluation tools to review curricula.
The program is guided by this statement: Families are the core teachers of the
values of sexual education. The school curriculum teachers teach the
science.
The curriculum is shared with parents. They have the choice to opt their child out of the program up to 30 days prior to the instruction provided in the classroom. Parents also have access to the website with the curriculum, resources on how to talk to their kids, and organized settings to come and listen to what is being taught. BPS teachers and Mount Baker Planned Parenthood staff provide instruction. They follow Office of Superintendent Public Instruction guidelines. Ms. Niederhausen outlined examples of goals and lesson plans for grades 4-5, 6-8, and 9-12, and how the lesson plans were implemented. She told us that curricula chosen by other states were also reviewed by our Washington communities (UnHushed; Flashed, and 3R’s).
This is a work in progress. In 2022-2023 they focused on 4th and 5th grade levels. In the next school year more teachers will be trained and the full curriculum scope will exist at all grade levels. In addition, parent education opportunities with communication with families, staff, and community will be constructed.
We also learned about the Teen Council (peer education opportunity) and the Citizens for BPS, a private group of citizens who are supportive of this program.
She encouraged us to go to the
Bellingham Schools website to learn more.
You can watch the video of this presentation
here. Ms. Niederhausen is an excellent presenter. And, as usual, our LWV crowd had insightful comments and questions. Bellingham families are well served by this hard-working and caring group of professionals.