Hertel wants to update sex ed

LANSING – A mother's tweets that brought national attention to sexual education in East Lansing has added new questions to a Greater Lansing lawmaker's efforts to reform sex ed in Michigan.

State Sen. Curtis Hertel Jr., D-Meridian Township, actually met with East Lansing students weeks before Alice Dreger live-tweeted her son's sex-ed class at East Lansing High School last week, generating stories from Vox, Salon and the Washington Post. He discussed updating the state's sex-ed standards with the ELHS group Students for Gender Equality, he said.

"We weren't reacting to what happened," Hertel said Monday. "We were actually being proactive."

But Hertel said Dreger's tweets and the resulting media coverage raised new questions and he'd asked schools within his 23rd state Senate District to provide information about their curriculum and their sex-ed advisory boards. He said he was particularly concerned about the private, anti-abortion affiliated group providing abstinence education in East Lansing that Dreger profaned with her tweets.

"I think that those groups don't have a great record when it comes to the truth, and I think that using them as a paid expert in our classrooms is a bad situation," Hertel, a member of the Senate Health Policy Committee, said Monday. "I don't think we have to necessarily use the amount of scare tactics that were being used. I think kids are smarter than that."

State law requires schools to "stress" abstinence.

East Lansing used a program called Sexually Mature Aware Responsible Teens, which is affiliated with Pregnancy Services of Greater Lansing, which counsels pregnant women to avoid abortion. An administrator with the program told the State Journal last week that its information is factual and based on U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention statistics. ELHS Principal Coby Fletcher said in a statement last week that the the group is only part of a broader sex-ed curriculum.

Hertel said he was still "very early in the drafting process" of his sex-ed legislation, and his original goal was to update the language and ensure state standards reflect the world kids live in today. He said, for example, "sexually transmitted infection" is now more widely accepted than the phrase "sexually transmitted disease" included in state statute.

"We want to teach people to be responsible, but at the same time we have to be realistic about the situation we're in," he said. "My kids aren't in high school, yet, but when they get to high school, I want to make sure they're getting accurate and helpful information."