The teen pregnancy rate in Henry County, Tennessee has increased over the years. The purpose of this project was to develop an evidence-based family life education policy for possible adoption by the board of education to address the persistent high teen pregnancy rate for girls aged 15-17 in the county. This present study resulted in a revised policy that was based on a comprehensive policy termed Abstinence-Centered Plus Contraception. An 18-member collaborative, organizational, and community project team, made up of community leaders, nurses, counselors, teachers, and students, assisted in the development and adoption of the policy, practice guidelines, and the development of implementation and evaluation plans for the newly adopted policy. The theoretical framework was based on the social, cognitive, and behavior change theories. The program logic model served as a framework to monitor its progress. Existing peer-reviewed literature, including research studies, state and national teen pregnancy prevention projects and curriculum, and publicly available statistics, were gathered and reviewed by the project team as background to be used for developing and changing policy at the institutional level. Project monitoring involved tracking processes surrounding policy and practice guideline development and adoption, as well as implementation and evaluation plan development for the adopted policy and whether these processes progressed as the empirically-derived teen pregnancy prevention projects should when changing sex education policy at the organizational level. This project resulted in policy adoption and developing a policy implementation and evaluation plan to be disseminated within a county school system that could decrease teen pregnancy rates and demonstrate positive outcomes.

High school youth in Grades 9-12 who are in public schools without comprehensive sexual health education (CSHED) are more likely to engage in high-risk sexual behaviors and have higher rates of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases than are their peers in schools with CSHED. The purpose of this correlational study was to explore the statistical relationship between the consistent implementation of CSHED, before and after the enactment of the Chicago Public Schools' (CPS) sexual health education policy, and the sexual risk behaviors of Chicago high school youth in Grades 9-12. The study was based on Antonovsky's salutogenic model of health and wellbeing. CPS students' sexual risk behaviors were analyzed using data obtained from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) for the years of 2007 and 2013. Logistic regression was used to estimate prevalence and odds ratios of each sexual risk behavior. The findings showed a complex pattern of and variances across the sexual risk behaviors analyzed. The prevalence of sexual behaviors among all students remained relatively stable. The prevalence estimates for students who drank alcohol or used drugs before the last sexual encounter and who were never taught about AIDS or HIV increased from 2007 to 2013. The likelihood of not using birth control pills before the last sexual intercourse encounter decreased among Black students; the likelihood that Hispanic/Latino students ever had sex, and had sex with 4 or more people in their life, decreased. The decrease of sexual risk behaviors indicates a positive influence by CSHED, while the increases indicate continuing challenges to the promotion of healthy sexual behaviors. These findings show the need for legislators and school administrators to increase support for the enactment of CSHED policy to help mitigate the sexual risk behaviors of high school youth.

The United States has the highest rates of teenage pregnancies, births, abortions, and sexually transmitted infections in the industrialized world. African American teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections are on the rise in many rural southwest school districts in the State of Georgia where the sex education curriculum is nonexistent or solely focuses on abstinence. Georgia ranked 4th in cases of primary and secondary syphilis, 6th in AIDS, 12th in gonorrhea, 14th in teen pregnancies, and 17th in chlamydia in the United States in 2012. The purpose of this qualitative study was to evaluate the perceptions of residents of a primarily African American rural southwest Georgia community regarding the importance of sex education and their knowledge of the school district's sex education curriculum. It specifically investigated abstinence-only sexual education using Bronfenbrenner's ecological learning theory. Study participants (n = 25) were African American youths in 9th grade, their parents, school officials, religious leaders, policymakers, and health advocates. The research questions were designed to investigate participants' knowledge of sexual health and effective sex education curricula for their school district. Data were collected from the participants via semi-structured interviews. MAXQDA 11.1 software was used for thematic analysis of transcribed interviews. The findings demonstrated community support for a comprehensive sex education curriculum and the need for a new paradigm in social policy that suggests initiatives should be evidence-based to achieve maximum efficacy in policy analysis. The study provides a baseline for school officials to assess community opinions regarding the acceptance of a comprehensive sex education curriculum.