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Saskatoon Sexual Health is ready to teach some teachers.
News of the new parental consent policies for sex education took the Saskatoon-based non-profit by surprise Tuesday. But next Wednesday, it will host an education session for teachers called Teaching Sex Ed 101.
SSH provides education on sexual and reproductive health.
The new parental inclusion and consent policies prevent third-party organizations like SSH from offering sexual health education in classrooms.
“Like most other organizations in education, sexual health and 2SLQBTQI+ organizing, we were pretty shocked,” SSH education outreach co-ordinator Delilah Kamuhanda said of the announcement Tuesday.
“We had no sort of prior warning or knowledge that such a policy would be coming along, but mostly shocked that with the pause on third-party organizations presenting in sexual health, we (had) not been notified of some sort of evaluation process.”
Kamuhanda said SSH would be open to receiving any list of criteria set up by the Ministry of Education and is confident it would be able to meet those criteria.
In addition to being shocked and disappointed by the announcement, Kamuhanda said she also worries for the students affected by these changes.
“As someone who is in classrooms, in youth programming (and) talking to youth, I know that sexual health is a space where a lot of sensitive topics, a lot of issues and sometimes even crises that young people are going through come up and (school) is a very important space for them to be able to share and seek resources and advice from adults that might have more (of an) understanding of the world around them and how to navigate issues,” Kamuhanda said.
Upon hearing about the policies, Kamuhanda wanted to ensure that parents and teachers have a means of having conversations facilitated by organizations like SSH or Planned Parenthood.
“I just didn’t want for sex ed to become non-existent in schools just because people didn’t feel well-equipped or prepared,” Kamuhanda said. “So on Wednesday, we will make sure that they are well-equipped and prepared because we can’t be (in schools) in person, but we can still support teachers in other ways and we want to make sure the community knows that we’re still here for them.”
Prior to the policy change, in a typical school year, teachers would request presentations from SSH through its website or via a form while also providing a reason for the request.
“Typically, it’s because they want to meet their curricular outcomes,” Kamuhanda said. “Then we would go about deciding what presentations. Typically it starts with healthy relationships and then we sort of build upon that.”
The session Wednesday is scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m. and will go on for an hour and a half. It’s to cover topics like sexuality, sexual health and healthy relationships.