Illinois House of Representatives recently presented the possibility of the state’s comprehensive sex education standards becoming mandatory.

While House Bill 5188 failed to make it to a vote before the end of the last session in January, it did manage to reignite a debate regarding the state’s adoption of the National Sex Education Standards last year.

Senate Bill 818, the bill adopting the NSES, was signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker in August 2021 after receiving much Republican criticism and Democratic support.

“Modernizing our sex education standards will help keep our children safe and ensure important lessons like consent and internet safety are taught in classrooms,” Pritzker said then. “By working together, we’ll continue to strengthen our education system and deliver the bright future our kids deserve.”

The NSES were developed by the Future of Sex Education Initiative, a collaboration between Advocates for Youth, Answer and SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change, three organizations with experience advocating for sex education for decades.

The preface of the NSES points to a number of testimonials and organizations which endorse the standards.

It also describes the goals of the standards, with the primarily goal being “to provide clear, consistent and straightforward guidance on the essential, minimum, core content and skills needed for sex education that is age-appropriate for students in grades K-12 to be effective.”

The NSES covers seven topics by which its content is organized. Among these are Consent and Healthy Relationships, Gender Identity and Expression and  Puberty and Adolescent Sexual Development.

The primary text of the NSES outlines standards for these topics by grade level. For example, in the Anatomy and Physiology topic, the standards say that, “by the end of the second grade, students should be able to list medically accurate names for body parts, including the genitals.”

The NSES also includes a glossary for the various terms and ideas used throughout its contents.

At futureofsexed.org, the organization points to a scientific article published in the Journal of Adolescent Health titled “Three Decades of Research: The Case for Comprehensive Sex Education.”

In that article, authors Eva S. Goldfarb, Ph.D., and Lisa D. Lieberman, Ph.D., reviewed a collection of 80 articles pertaining to sex education to determine the benefits of comprehensive sex ed beyond the usual concerns of pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease prevention.

The authors ultimately conclude there is “evidence for the effectiveness of approaches that address a broad definition of sexual health and take positive, affirming, inclusive approaches to human sexuality.”

While there was significant support among NSES proponents and Illinois Democrats, Republicans in the state heavily criticized the standards and a vast minority of school districts in the state ended up actually adopting them.

Monroe County school districts were among those opting out of the standards, with local superintendents broadly expressing they weren’t the right fit for the area.

Waterloo Superintendent of Schools Brian Charron said that, while some components of the NSES were worse than others, he generally didn’t feel children were ready for the standard’s topics at all.

“I think it’s fair to say I’m disturbed by them,” Charron said. “I do not think it’s appropriate to be introducing the topics in the detail that they are being proposed at the age levels that they’re being proposed.”

Charron further said he was disappointed in the state for adopting the standards, adding he feels the NSES are “out of touch with reality.”

He went on to say, in regard to sex ed, there are some topics that can be appropriate such as “good touch, bad touch,” which can help kids know how to report abuse and who to report it to.

Charron said Waterloo’s focus has been and will continue to be health education. That focus would be maintained even if there was community support for the standards.

“We have always just provided health education,” Charron said, “and when we are covering sensitive topics, we alert parents to those sensitive topics and give them an opportunity to opt their child out of participating in those sensitive topics.”

Columbia Superintendent of Schools Chris Grode said he felt the standards aren’t particularly right or wrong in terms of their content. He emphasized the delineation between the responsibilities of the school and the family.

Grode added he was pleased the standards weren’t made mandatory. The NSES, he said, “don’t meet Columbia where they’re at.”

“I believe that I’m here to educate the youth, and a lot of that is reading, writing and arithmetic,” Grode said. “That doesn’t mean that we don’t teach kids how to be good citizens, because we do. But there’s stuff about families that are rather personal, and so I’m going to stay focused on the education and let the families focus on the family stuff.”

Monroe-Randolph County Regional Superintendent of Schools Kelton Davis confirmed none of the districts in his two counties had adopted the NSES.

Davis said he recommends individuals read the standards before they criticize. Davis added he felt the standards were inappropriate.

“Just from my perspective, there are some very inappropriate concepts in there that I would not feel comfortable as an educator teaching,” Davis said. “I dove into the standards, and even at the fifth grade level, some of the content just was way over the top and I think too far.”

Davis recalled a question he had posed to a colleague about the standards. He questioned a specific part of the standards which he described as “teaching masturbation to fifth graders.”

Within the NSES, one of the standards under the Puberty and Adolescent Sexual Development topic states that “by the end of the fifth grade, students should be able to explain common human sexual development and the role of hormones (e.g., romantic and sexual feelings, masturbation, mood swings, timing of pubertal onset).”

Davis also spoke against what he described as an increasing number of mandates and additional requirements for graduation.

He ultimately questioned the overall purpose of the NSES and what benefits such standards would offer students.

“The question is, ‘How is this better for us? Our kids?’” Davis said. “When we compare it to this subject, this subject and this subject, how is this advancing us as a society? And not in social terms, but what’s it doing for us? And what’s the research out there? What problem are we solving by mandating this?”