From the Texas Women’s Coalition:
The State Board of Education (SBOE) voted 13-1 today to approve all four high school health textbooks. Due in large part to the efforts of the Protect Our Kids Coalition, Glencoe/McGraw-Hill added to its two Teacher’s Editions a chart listing information about birth control and methods of preventing sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). (The Holt Teacher’s Edition already contained this information.) Unfortunately, publishers did not add this life-saving information to their Student’s Editions. The 4 million high school students who will rely on these books for up-to-date, accurate information will be left to learn from friends, television and the Internet.That's bittersweet. We should probably count our blessings that contraceptives were even acknowledged and that much of the proposed homophobic language was dropped. Nonetheless, I think the SBOE should be ashamed of our state teen pregnancy rate and made politically responsible for their unquestionable contribution to its perpetuation... Posted by sarah at November 6, 2004 12:10 AM | TrackBackThe SBOE also voted to add to the Holt middle school textbooks a definition of marriage as between a man and a woman. The publishers did not make other changes about homosexuality proposed yesterday by religious-right SBOE member Terri Leo.