California Accepted Papers Paper: Sex Education Policy in the Los Angeles Unified School District

*Names in bold indicate Presenter

Keara Pina, Devon Schechinger, Ben Parnes, Zi Wang and Katie Solomon, University of California, Los Angeles


The California Healthy Youth Act (CHYA), enacted in 2016, bans the promotion of abstinence-only sexual health education and requires schools to provide medically-accurate, age-appropriate, comprehensive, and unbiased sexual health and HIV-prevention education. Such education must be provided to all students at least once in middle school and once in high school. In the process of complying with the California Healthy Youth Act, the Los Angeles Unified School District must draft its own sex education policy passed by the LAUSD Board of Education. This paper addresses how LAUSD can strategically draft and successfully implement a district-wide comprehensive sex education policy to ensure all schools comply with CHYA and its relevant amendments.

Passing and implementing a sex education policy in LAUSD is a dynamic challenge considering the district is the 2nd largest in the U.S. with 1,386 schools and currently serving 673,849 students. Geographically, LAUSD spans 960 square miles and is divided into 6 local districts by region. LAUSD’s most current sex education policy requires comprehensive sex education and HIV/AIDS prevention education for all 7th and 9th graders in the district, but lacks reference to CHYA and many of its mandates, thus indicating the need for updated district requirements.

Furthermore, health trends and behaviors in the district highlight the need for an updated policy to implement CHYA mandates. In terms of HIV and AIDS infection, LA County still has the second-highest number of people living with HIV in any metropolitan area in the United States. Additionally, the County recorded the highest number of primary and secondary syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia cases of any U.S. county in 2017, and it has the highest number of teen births among U.S. counties. Youth health behavior data also reveal warning signs behind health outcomes, such as high numbers of partners, high levels of substance use, low rates of testing, and low rates of condom use.

Research has shown that comprehensive sexual health education has favorable effects on health behaviors and health outcomes. Still, the reality of sex education can hardly be defined as adequate - based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2018 School Health Profiles, only 58.5% of middle schools and 79.9% of high schools in LAUSD teach all 20 sexual health topics recommended by CDC. This data indicates persistent gaps, highlighting the importance of comprehensive sex education.

Our policy research is aimed to address two goals specifically: generate language, research, and empirical analysis to aid in the drafting of a new district-wide sex education policy and design an implementation strategy to achieve compliance across LAUSD.

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