It’s after hours at Rafael Hernandez, an elementary school in the Bronx, and Room 421 is in an uproar.
It’s what you would expect from a sixth-grade sex education class learning how to put a condom on.
Sex education: The very concept makes a lot of people cringe, conjuring images of teenage giggles and discomfort. It’s also a subject a lot of teachers would rather avoid.
But Bronx-based teacher Lena Solow is more than happy to talk about the birds, the bees … and beyond.
Solow has been teaching for 10 years. She covers the topics you’d expect, like pregnancy and how to prevent sexually transmitted diseases. But Solow talks about way more than going all the way. “One of my biggest goals as a sex educator is to be sex-positive,” she explains, “to talk about pleasure and to talk about sex not just as something that just makes babies.”
Dressed in a leather jacket with tousled hair, Solow looks a little like the Joan Jett of sex educators. She remembers her own elementary school education as less than stellar. “We had mostly the gym teachers teaching us sex ed,” she smiles. “I definitely had spelling tests as a big part of my sex ed when I was in middle school: ‘Spell gonorrhea. Spell gonococcus. Now you pass or don’t pass health.’ Literally, that was what was prioritized.”
Solow now works for WHEDco, a Bronx-based community development organization that includes sex education in its programs for youth. Solow teaches along with peer educators — high schoolers who assist her teaching.
Peer educators are a key part of the equation, advocates say, especially with so many kids exposed to information about sex. Bianca Laureano is a co-founder of the Women of Color Sexual Health Network. She says that having instructors who share the students’ backgrounds “affirms young people’s identities, and they can feel comfortable speaking with someone who not only mirrors their own cultural experiences, but also gives them the example of someone who has persevered. Resilience.”
There are no spelling tests in this class. But Solow does talk to kids about writing. Sexting, that is, and the legal ramifications of sending and receiving racy pictures of underage youths, even if they themselves are well underage. It can count as child pornography, she warns. To read more from JASMINE GARSD, click here.