The debate over sex education in Worcester came to a head in February, at a meeting that saw nearly two hours of public comment. On one side, advocates pushed for the committee to adopt a sex education curriculum that teaches consent and is inclusive of LGBTQ lifestyles – one in line with educational best practices and backed up by data. On the other, people protested the frank talk about sex with city youth and cast comprehensive sex education as a cause of moral decay.

But here’s the thing: the latter had already won the battle months before that February meeting took place.

Records provided to Worcester Magazine show how private meetings and conversations with both the superintendent and the mayor, and a hold on a key subcommittee, kept a comprehensive sex education proposal called Making Proud Choices from seeing the light of a single public meeting, let alone a vote. After Making Proud Choices died, the superintendent offered a compromise curriculum so unpopular the mayor pulled it from consideration days before it was set for a vote.

And so the mayor and the School Committee, after that heated meeting in February, decided to do nothing for the time being. Instead, they’ll wait for new guidelines supposedly forthcoming from the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education while a working group put together by the mayor works on the issue.

While state guidelines could change, the forces that blocked comprehensive sex education from implementation are still in place. Emails between School Committee members, Mayor Joe Petty and Superintendent Maureen Binienda show a small and politically-powerful group of religious conservatives have sway over the administration of the Worcester Public Schools.

Meanwhile, the teen birth rate, especially among students of color, is much higher than the state average, and rates of STIs like gonorrhea and chlamydia are on the rise among Worcester youth. While comprehensive, evidence-based sex ed has been shown in academic studies and surveys to curb unprotected sex and delay the time youth start having sex, such a curriculum is unlikely to pass the Worcester School Committee in its current form, based on the way Making Proud Choices was handled.

Former School Committee member Mary Mullaney, one of the key figures involved, is among those with both political influence and a moral opposition to comprehensive sex education. In an email to Binienda last September, Mullaney diagnosed what she saw as the real problem with what she called “urban kids.”

“Five years from now the situation will be the same or worse because what is lacking here is strong families, good moral upbringing, fathers in homes, faith in a higher power. We put bandaids on huge problems and feel good that we are ‘trying,’” Mullaney wrote to Binienda. “You know better than anyone in Worcester — because you are the REAL thing when it comes to urban kids — that these children are spiritually and psychologically impoverished, neglected, abused. They need love, guidance, support, alternatives to the crap they see around them. Condoms will not save their souls. I am not sure if they will even help their bodies as they are too young to use them well, but I know for sure that condoms will not heal their soul or solve the loneliness in their hearts.”

In Worcester — often billed as progressive by city leaders — Mullaney’s is the view that won out on sex education last fall, and Worcester students will continue to enter the adult world without a consistent, medically-accurate and comprehensive education on STIs, HIV, pregnancy, condom use and consent considered standard in most school districts in the state.

THE DEATH OF MPC

Binienda decided last September to pull Making Proud Choices, a curriculum offered by the WISH task force after a year-and-a-half evaluation process of a dozen sex ed curriculums. The Worcester Impact on Sexual Health task force, or WISH, is comprised of members from 14 groups: Center for Health Impact, City Hall, Dynamy Youth Academy, the Edward M. Kennedy Community Health Center, Girls Inc. of Worcester, Pathways for Change, Safe Homes, Community Builders, the Unitarian Universalist Church, the Worcester Division of Public Health, Worcester Public Schools, the YWCA and, importantly for those opposed, the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts.

Though the WISH task force was comprised of many local groups, and engaged in surveying that found comprehensive sex ed to be popular among Worcester parents and students, the process, among some of those opposed, was given a shorthand: Planned Parenthood Boston is forcing a curriculum on Worcester. As Mullaney put it in one email to Binienda last December, “...since Boston Planned Parenthood is gearing up to influence our city schools, we citizens of Worcester will want to have our say as well.”

Binienda withdrew it, at first to re-examine, and then for good, under pressure applied privately by Mullaney and others. Records show a flurry of emails sent to both the mayor and superintendent, as well as the circulation of a scathing four-page memo on the curriculum by School Committee member Brian O’Connell, precipitated Binienda’s decision to withdraw the curriculum two days before a Sept. 12 meeting of the Standing Committee on Teaching, Learning and Student Supports, which O’Connell chairs, to address it.

In an email sent to Binienda on Sept. 8, Mullaney cast the MPC curriculum as an affront to religious families, both Christian and Islamic. She also downplayed the teen birth rate issue, saying it is low across the state without mentioning that in Worcester it is nearly twice as high, and more than five times as high for Latina teens in Worcester. She also asked for discretion.

“I hope this can all be resolved quietly,” she said.

On the same day, she emailed School Committee member John Monfredo – a member, along with O’Connell and Molly McCullough, of the Standing Committee on Teaching, Learning and Student Supports. She warned of a “potential firestorm brewing.”

“Fortunately,” she wrote, “this hasn’t leaked to the media, so I hope the subcommittee can quell this potential problem.”

The next day, Mullaney wrote to Petty, calling the program “morally abhorrent” and saying she felt the mayor would not want his children receiving sex education in middle school.

“If it’s not good enough for your children, or mine, then why is it being considered?” she wrote. “To think that ‘minority’ students ‘need’ this is condescending, elitist, and yes, racist. Please help avoid the debacle and the divisiveness this curriculum will cause in our community by pulling it from consideration and going for something which reflects Worcester values.”

She later forwarded the email to O’Connell, who thanked her for “an excellent and incisive letter.”

Mullaney also emailed McCullough before the subcommittee meeting, invoking the tenure of McCullough’s mother as an educator.

“I would be interested in the opinion of middle school educators, like your mother, as to the effect such a curriculum would have on the climate of their buildings,” she wrote.

McCullough said in response she called the superintendent to express concern about the curriculum.

Meanwhile, both Mullaney and O’Connell reached out among religious communities to build a coalition.

In several emails ahead of the subcommittee meeting, O’Connell circulated a four-page memo on the program he wrote, entitled “Sex Education Proposed For Grades 6, 7 and 8 of the Worcester Public Schools is ‘Extraordinarily Graphic, Amoral, Culturally insensitive, Potentially Offensive to Certain Ethnic/Religious and Minority Populations and Inappropriate’ for elementary and middle school students.”

Both his and Mullaney’s opposition drew heavily on the fact that some devout Muslim families may find the curriculum offensive, and they gathered the support of several local religious leaders in the local Islamic community. In a separate email sent months later to a local attorney active in the fight against sex ed, O’Connell said, “I hope, though, that the support of the Islamic community will help more than hurt here, especially as Islam is a religion of significant minority populations that some who otherwise support PP (Planned Parenthood) may be reluctant to offend.”

On Sept. 10, two days before the curriculum was set for its first subcommittee review, Binienda pulled it, and it was never brought back. An email from School Committee clerk Helen Friel to O’Connell sealed the curriculum’s fate.

“I wanted to let you know that the Superintendent has asked me to pull the item back regarding the Sexual Education Unit for further review,” Friel wrote to O’Connell, chairman of the committee.

O’Connell forwarded the email on the same day to four people, including Mullaney and two local Catholic priests.

“I believe this situation remains very volatile, and warrants close monitoring in the days ahead. Once I talk with Maureen, I will update you as well,” he said.

Mullaney wrote later in the week to thank Binienda for withdrawing the curriculum. She urged Binienda to resist political pressure from the mayor.

“I realize my passion for this issue may not be the same as yours, but I am sure we share the belief that a public, bloody battle serves no one,” she wrote.

Later in the email, she said she “sees nothing wrong with the status quo” and that she does “not care what Somerville is doing. I would not live there.” She derided the program as an invention of Planned Parenthood, and requested the school department write an in-house curriculum instead of buying one from Planned Parenthood or “like-minded organizations.”

Making Proud Choices is published by Advanced Health Equity and co-authored by four doctors with specialties related to sexual health.

Binienda responded to the email, saying health teachers and the department head had reviewed the curriculum, but, she said, “I think it is a better idea to meet again and review what we want the message to be.”

In a long email response, Mullaney thanked Binienda and shed some light on her views.

“It is one thing to identify societal problems and it is another to have a utopian view that all problems can be solved – especially in schools,” she wrote. “Perhaps there is an ‘epidemic’ of STDs and pregnancies – that has not been verified to my satisfaction. But how to address this is the issue, and whether schools are the fora to do so.”

At the end of the email, she addressed a running theme through many of the emails between opponents of comprehensive sex education reviewed by Worcester magazine.

“Organizations like PP (Planned Parenthood) offer easy solutions … Have an abortion, easy. But who is there for that girl in the months and years to come? Who holds her hand when she bleeds and cries?” she wrote.

Though advocates would continue to press for Making Proud Choices, the curriculum would never see a public meeting – a fact some School Committee members have loudly criticized.

At a meeting several weeks ago, School Committee member Dante Comparetto accused O’Connell of deliberately holding back subcommittee meetings on Making Proud Choices. The accusation led to an on-the-floor argument with the mayor, in which Petty called Comparetto’s accusation “disgraceful,” and Comparetto in turn said the same of O’Connell’s handling of the curriculum.

School Committee member Jack Foley said in a recent interview he felt the subcommittee skirted the proper process. The curriculum, he said, should have gone to the full committee, then to the subcommittee for public hearings and debate, then back to the committee for a vote.

“This didn’t follow that pattern, and that creates more controversy and more tension,” he said. “All of a sudden it was yanked by the administration or by the chair or by both. That violates our process.”

Reached for comment, Mullaney said her issue was that the WISH Taskforce (Worcester Impact on Sexual Health), which proposed the Making Proud Choices curriculum did not include input from religious conservatives, so it was not a transparent process involving the whole community.

O’Connell, reached for comment, defended Binienda’s decision to pull the curriculum, saying it’s her prerogative to put forth a curriculum she supports.

“I have never voted to impose on her a curriculum which she either opposed, or chose to withdraw from consideration. In fact, I believe the School Committee would exceed its authority under law if it were to do so,” he said. “When the superintendent proposes and supports another sex education curriculum, I hope it will be thoroughly presented in a public meeting, and considered in detail.”

DECEMBER

At the time, in September, the maneuvering to pull Making Proud Choices stayed, for the most part, out of public scrutiny. However, when Binienda rolled out a compromise curriculum in December, the debate intensified and the same players behind the death of Making Proud Choices sought to consolidate support around the compromise solution – a curriculum called the Michigan Model for Health, which is an abstinence-only curriculum with an added option of discussing condoms, which technically makes the curriculum “abstinence-based.”

Much has been written about the poor results of abstinence-based sex education curriculum, ground covered in Worcester Magazine’s first cover story on the issue (“The long, winding road to sex ed in Worcester,” Feb. 14). Many advocates said as much, calling the curriculum a shame-based, harsh curriculum which will cause more harm than good. But for the religious right, the curriculum was seen as a worthy compromise. Leading up to key meetings on the issue in December, January and February, Mullaney, O’Connell and others worked to secure four votes to pass the Michigan Model.

In a Dec. 18 email to O’Connell, Mullaney said she sent committee member Dianna Biancheria “a pretty blunt email and almost threatened to run again for SC if she isn’t with us.” In the email, she told Biancheria, “I would like to think that we can count on your support to uphold the decency which has always been the backbone of Worcester people.”

On Dec. 28, Mullaney requested O’Connell do what he can to prevent the Michigan Model from going to discussion at a full School Committee meeting, as she said the mayor was planning to do.

“That could easily turn into a circus, if boatloads of people come,” she said. “So I’m asking you all to shepherd this procedurally to avoid a debacle.”

Mullaney also secured a meeting with Petty, in which he promised — at least according to her retelling — that Making Proud Choices was no longer being considered.

ANTI-PLANNED PARENTHOOD

Throughout many of the correspondences between Mullaney, O’Connell, Monfredo and others, there existed a running theme of demonizing Planned Parenthood, an organization tangentially responsible for creating the curriculum and moving it forward in Worcester.

In December, the group worked actively to block a meeting at Friendly House for sex ed organizers and activists. On Dec. 17, Mullaney attempted to apply pressure on Dottie Hargrove, sister of Gordon Hargrove, owner of Friendly House.

“Dottie, can you please ask Gordon why Boston Planned Parenthood was meeting at Friendly House to discuss WPS sex education?” she wrote. “The curriculum they promote is condom-based for middle schoolers and is so graphic that the community rose up to oppose it. We are fighting back. Hopefully, Gordon didn’t know that Friendly House hosted these people whose agenda is so left wing and against Worcester values.”

The attempt was unsuccessful.

“I do not understand why Planned Parenthood could not meet at Friendly House,” Dottie wrote in response. “The agency is a place for everyone and open to all … I believe anyone who has been bothering him with complaints should reconsider their values.”

In the hundreds of emails between O’Connell, Monfredo and Mullaney, Planned Parenthood was cast as an evil force pushing a curriculum with bad intentions.

On Jan. 24, Mullaney connected the fight to national issues.

“The world is a stupid, stupid place,” she said. “Look at what happened in the NY Senate yesterday re: abortion. Covington Catholic. Brett Kavanaugh – all these things go back to abortion and the infiltration by the left of the American nuclear family.”

O’Connell agreed.

“Like you, I worry more with each passing year about truly frightening developments like the proposed New York legislation, Covington Catholic and so much of the deliberation surrounding the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh,” he said. “Catholic anti-defamation initiatives truly need to highlight implicit or explicit anti-Catholic bias when it occurs, calling it what it is.”

TOWARD THE FUTURE

On Feb. 7, Binienda’s compromise proposal, the Michigan Model, fell to the chopping block as Mayor Petty had announced he would pull the curriculum while waiting for state standards.

The next day, Mullaney sent a follow-up email to both Petty and Binienda warning that too “radical” a sex education proposal will cause people to flee the city.

“People will leave the city, leave the schools,” she said. “You have to maintain a balance or you will have the kind of flight to the suburbs which those other cities [Springfield and Boston] know only too well.”

She also suggested her husband be appointed to the newly-formed study committee on sex education curricula, among several others. In a separate email, she lobbied Binienda to consider making sex ed a voluntary after-school program, and Binienda thanked her for the suggestion.

Now Binienda has come under fire from the Worcester Interfaith Coalition. Her administration, they say, has not adequately addressed racial disparities in punishment, absenteeism and dropout rates. The coalition is calling for Binienda’s contract not to be renewed, and for School Safety Director Rob Pezzella to be removed from his position.

While not mentioned in the statement, the teen birth rate is a glaring disparity in Worcester. The rate for white teens is 13 per 1,000 people. The rate for Latino girls is 50 per 1,000.

When Petty made comprehensive sex education a key policy goal of his term last January, he did so acknowledging the problem.

“I will not allow a young woman to forego her future because we did not give her the tools to succeed,” he said.

With an election season coming into focus, and a School Committee deeply divided on a path toward sex education, it remains to be seen whether he can make good on the promise.