NEWS_ARTICLE.RttP{MA will no longer apply for abstinence only funding.}

Patrick seeks to forgo grant, end classes on sex abstinence
But leaders in House back funding

By Lisa Wangsness, Globe Staff | April 24, 2007

Governor Deval Patrick wants to end state-sponsored , abstinence-only sex education in Massachusetts, a year after Governor Mitt Romney ordered the Department of Public Health to redirect a long-standing federal abstinence grant to classes that focus exclusively on encouraging teenagers to avoid sexual encounters.
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Patrick proposed forgoing the $700,000 grant, which the state has received since 1998, joining at least six other states in rebelling against increasingly restrictive federal mandates about how the money can be used.

The Patrick administration points to the federal government's study of abstinence-education programs, released this month, which found that students in programs focusing solely on abstinence are just as likely to have sex as those not in such programs. At the same time, health officials say, the programs' emphasis on the failure rate of condoms and other birth control, without providing instruction about their benefits, may confuse young people and discourage them from using protection.

"We don't believe that the science of public health is pointing in the direction of very specific and narrowly defined behavioral approaches like the one that is mandated by this funding," said John Auerbach, the state commissioner of public health.

Patrick's policy change, proposed in his budget, has met resistance in the House, where Democratic leaders restored the funding in the budget plan that came to the floor yesterday at the start of a week-long debate.

They included a provision, as they did last year, requiring schools offering the abstinence program to also provide comprehensive sex education classes. Under federal rules, comprehensive sex education must be taught separately because abstinence grant money cannot support programs that also promote the use of birth control.

Defending the change, Jim Eisenberg, a spokesman for the House Ways and Means Committee, said, "It enunciates a policy, and the policy is that federal funds for school-based abstinence education should be accessed, so long as abstinence is always taught as part of a comprehensive sexuality education curriculum."

But even if the House prevails, a spokesman for the Department of Public Health said the state will not apply for the money.

The grant program that funds abstinence education was created by Congress in 1996 as part of welfare law changes, with the aim of discouraging teenagers from having sex outside marriage. Most states took the money and at first were allowed wide flexibility in how they used the funds. Until 2003, Massachusetts used the money for public service announcements encouraging teenagers to wait for marriage before having sex. The state then began spending the money on supplementary educational materials promoting abstinence.

In late 2005, Romney -- then a potential presidential candidate who was trying to establish credentials as a social conservative -- announced that he would channel the money directly into expanding abstinence education programs in schools. During the remainder of his administration, Massachusetts funneled more than $800,000 to Healthy Futures, a group that had been running abstinence education programs in more than three dozen middle schools.