Kachemak Bay Family Planning Clinic will offer free Kenai Peninsula Borough School District-approved sexual health education courses in an off-campus setting for teens.
The first course will be for 12- to 14-year-old students and will be held Nov. 4-8 from 4-6 p.m. The second course will be for 15- to 18-year-old students and will be held Nov. 18-22 from 4-6 p.m. Parent permission is required to attend the courses.
The course titled Comprehnsive Sexual Health Education will take place at the clinic, located at 3957 Nielsen Circle in Homer. Each course is limited to 10 students. The workshops will be facilitated by Adult Education Coordinator Tyler Moskios-Schlieman and trained teen peer educators with two or more years of experience.
Moskios-Schlieman said in order to be certified with the district to teach the curriculum he has to go through extensive training and ongoing professional development. For example, he is planning to attend the upcoming National Sex Education conference that will take place in Philadelphia in December. Community liaison Jane Rohr will also attend.
Key topics in the workshop series will include puberty, reproductive anatomy, sexually transmitted infection prevention, values exploration, contraception, abstinence, body image, boundaries, consent and interpersonal violence prevention. More specific details for each of these core topics are available on the KBFPC website: www.kbfpc.org.
Content will be based on National Sex Education Standards and the clinic’s “Resiliency Informed Sexual Health and Wellness” lesson plans, a 140-page publication that was approved by the district in 2017.
Moskios-Schlieman said the event will be “very casual but personal.”
“It’ll be fun. We’re going to laugh about some things but there will be some serious conversation as well.”
He said that some of what they cover is not just sex education but general life skills. He said one personal role model of his once told him, “’sex ed is self ed’, and that’s kind of what I go by when it comes to teaching this class.”
Healthy communication is a theme emphasized throughout the course, he said.
Another quality of offering the classes off campus is the number of participants is small and the space is smaller than typical classrooms. Moskios-Schlieman said sometimes a setting like this can help students “ask the questions that you’ve always been curious about.”
“We cover so much in five days. A lot of it is conversations that a lot of people don’t typically have, and so we try to make a safe space for that,” he said.
A virtual version of the course will be offered again later in the winter.
This lesson package, available online, was developed by the Kachemak Bay Family Planning Clinic’s REC Room youth program staff and education team in 2016 and revised in 2017 and provides many acknowledgements to local contributors.
For more detailed information and to register online, visit the Kachemak Bay Family Planning Clinic website. KBFPC will also have a booth at the upcoming Rotary Health Fair.
