Over the next year, school districts serving hundreds of thousands of Denver-area students will take a look at whether their sex education classes are doing enough to teach about consent.

Earlier this year, Gov. Jared Polis signed House Bill 1032, which requires school districts that teach sex ed to include lessons about consent. Colorado doesn’t require sex ed, and districts that don’t provide it aren’t required to add the new lessons.

Sheridan School District is the only Denver-area district to report that it doesn’t have a sex ed curriculum.

Colorado’s standards for health education already recommended teaching about healthy relationships starting in sixth grade, but the new law further defines what that should include.

The Colorado Department of Education hasn’t endorsed any particular curriculum, so districts will have to determine what should satisfy the law’s requirements.

“Nothing in the legislation identifies any rules on what constitutes an acceptable lesson on consent,” said Jeremy Meyer, spokesman for the education department.

The law defines consent as “affirmative, unambiguous, voluntary, continuous, knowing agreement between all participants in each physical act within the course of a sexual encounter or interpersonal relationship.” In other words, a person not saying no isn’t enough; agreeing to one sexual activity doesn’t mean agreement to all options, or that the person agrees to that activity forever; and coercing someone to say yes is unacceptable.

The statute requires instructing students on how to give consent, recognize if someone else is giving or withdrawing consent, and avoid making unwanted advances based on assumptions.

Several Denver-area districts, including Cherry Creek School District, Englewood Schools, Adams County School District 14, Adams 12 Five Star Schools and Westminster Public Schools, said they are starting the process of reviewing their sex ed lessons.

In the Douglas County School District, each school previously could decide on its own how to teach sex ed, and the district is starting to develop a more consistent curriculum, spokeswoman Paula Hans said.

Aurora Public Schools and Littleton Public Schools didn’t respond to questions from The Denver Post about their plans to comply with House Bill 1032.

Joe Ferdani, spokesman for Adams 12, said the district had started working on revising its health curriculum before the bill passed. An advisory committee of teachers, students, parents and others is evaluating how well the current curriculum matches the law and state standards.

The plan is to select a new health curriculum by September, and then to start training teachers and gradually roll it out for the 2020-2021 school year, he said.

Teaching healthy relationships

Some districts are confident their health classes already cover consent in sufficient depth. Officials at the Boulder Valley School District reported they have taught about consent for several years, and a Mapleton Public Schools representative said that district adopted a new curriculum in March that will cover healthy relationships.

Jaime Grimm-Rice, health education content specialist at Jeffco Public Schools, said healthy relationships are already part of the curriculum in fifth and seventh grades, and in high school, but the district still will review its curriculum. The younger children start with general information about personal boundaries, and get more instruction about communication when they reach middle school, she said.

Only in high school does dating, and how a relationship could be healthy or violent, become a major subject.

“We were pretty much right on target” with the curriculum, she said. “Consent is in all three of those topic areas.”

Rose Barcklow, a sexual health specialist at Denver Public Schools, said the district also teaches about consent and won’t need to make changes to comply with the new law.

Younger kids don’t learn about sex, but they do talk about assertive communication — saying what you want clearly, while not trampling on anyone else, Barcklow said. At that age, the examples discussed mostly have to do with recess games and requests from friends. Kids tend to start puberty in fourth or fifth grade, so it’s important to learn those skills early, she said.

“What we actually want is the foundation of good communication skills and the understanding of what a healthy relationship looks like,” she said.

As kids get older, they start discussing dating, and how to spot signs of manipulation and emotional abuse, Barcklow said. They also discuss how to be “allies” if they see a situation where another person could be mistreated, she said.

What is and isn’t acceptable

While the meaning of “yes” or “no” might be simple, it’s important for young people to receive clear instruction about what is and isn’t acceptable in a sexual context, said Chessy Prout, a consent activist who spoke at the National Association of School Nurses conference in Aurora in late June. Prout was raped by an older student as a freshman at St. Paul’s School, a boarding school in New Hampshire that later agreed to state oversight as student reports of sexual abuse mounted.

It’s impossible to know if the rapist would have behaved differently if he’d received education about consent, but Prout said the school could have done more to teach students to support, rather than ostracize, victims of sexual violence. She left St. Paul’s after friends shunned her for reporting the rape and other students raised money for the rapist’s legal defense.

“We weren’t taught this stuff in school,” she said.

Teachers and parents can get the message about consent across in subtle ways, like asking younger kids if they prefer a hug, a fist bump or a high-five, Prout said.

As kids get older, it’s more important to discuss how to treat other people in a sexual context, because unfortunately, not everyone has gotten the message that they can’t force another person, she said.

“This is basically just about respect… and communication,” she said.