Judy Putnam: Prof live tweets ELHS sex ed

EAST LANSING — Alice Dreger attended her son's sex education class at East Lansing High School on Wednesday. She live tweeted it, too.

With 45 sharply worded tweets, she eviscerated the abstinence-focused sex education class. She made local school officials look like rubes on a national stage. And she did a bit of swearing, which she says led to her banishment from the high school campus.

By the end of the day, her tweets had been picked up by the national websites Salon and Vox.

East Lansing High School Principal Coby Fletcher issued a statement today saying that the district includes abstinence education but it's not abstinence-only education as many were led to believe based on the tweets.

"Abstinence-based instruction teaches that abstinence is the only way to be completely safe, but the curriculum also reviews contraception choices. This parent attended on a day where abstinence was being taught,'' he said in the statement.

Dreger said today that Fletcher has banned her from the high school except for her freshman son's events because she swore in front of students at the end of the class. She says she's really being punished for shining a light on the use of a curriculum that's driven by a conservative agenda.

She said she has no regrets, except for the swearing.

"I am genuinely outraged that this is happening in a progressive school in a college town,'' Dreger said.

Dreger, an outspoken author, a professor of medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University and founder of the local news cooperative East Lansing Info, was able to attend her son's sex education class because district policy allows parents to monitor such classes.

The abstinence class is part of the district's overall sex education unit. According to Fletcher, it is called SMART for Sexually Mature Aware Responsible Teens. It's provided by an independent contractor working with Pregnancy Services of Greater Lansing, a group that counsels pregnant women to avoid abortion.

Lori Bolan, the administrator of SMART, said East Lansing has been using the program for 22 years to cover abstinence. She said it is fact-based using Centers for Disease Control statistics.

"We are trying to give them an option,'' she said. "We're just one portion of what the school provides."

Bolan declined to provide the PowerPoint used in the class and the instructor's name.

I have to say that the trail of tweets makes it look like Dreger had a mission to criticize from the outset, though some of the tweets do raise questions with me.

Before the class began: "The kid has invited me to his health class on sex ed to see how bad it is, so I'm going. But hands over my mouth means I can't live-tweet it."

Then, unfortunately for East Lansing schools, she found a spot with wifi.

Ten minutes into the class she tweeted: "I can't stand this. They're teaching 'abstinence stories' that worked and non-abstinence' stories that 'led to consequences.'"

Then: "I feel like raising my hand and saying 'Can I tell my sexual history, which involves a lot of pleasure before and during marriage?'"

Dreger's position on eliminating shame from sex education is clear. She penned an article last year for Pacific Standard Magazine: "What if We Admitted to Children That Sex is Primarily About Pleasure?"

She also criticized the accuracy of the data, including an 18% failure rate for condoms – actually true, though it doesn't mean one out of five condoms fails and it's unclear how the presenter was using it – and the health teacher's use of LGBYT instead of LGBT for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. (Fletcher emailed me to say it's LGBTY with youth at the end.)

Another tweet: "The whole lesson here is sex is part of a terrible lifestyle. Drugs, unemployment, failure to finish school – sex is part of the disaster."

Some of her tweets included profanities.

Personally, I don't have a problem with abstinence education. I do have a problem with abstinence-only education. The East Lansing School District's official policy calls for the "Sex Education Advisory Board" to ensure "that materials and instruction in sex education emphasize abstinence and are age-appropriate and medically accurate." Advisory board members are not listed.

Fletcher called Dreger's actions disappointing in his statement.

"...I support the appropriate expression of a plurality of viewpoints; however, I am very concerned by the utter lack of civility I see conveyed in the tweets and the behavior the tweeter admits to exhibiting in the classroom. This is not representative of the conduct we expect to see adults model for our students."

But if abstinence education as part of a broader curriculum seems reasonable, some of the tweets from Dreger do raise questions about the material. ("You'll find a good girl. If you find one that says 'no,' that's the one you want." HE ACTUALLY JUST SAID THAT.")

Dreger may well have valid points on misguided sex education but I'm not sure embarrassing her own school district using tweets littered with the f-bomb is the right way to make them.

Read the tweets

To read Alice Dreger's tweets from a sex education class at East Lansing High School, some of which include vulgar language, click here.

Judy Putnam is a news columnist for the Lansing State Journal. Email her at jputnam@lsj.com, call 267-1304 or write to 120 E. Lenawee St., Lansing, MI 48919. You can also find her at www.facebook.com/ judyputnam and on Twitter @JudyPutnam.