All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, fills sex education gaps with OWL classes

Margo Starr grew up attending All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa. When she was in middle school, the church offered Sunday afternoon classes, including a sex education course. Her friends enrolled, and she joined them. Now a college student, she said she cannot imagine her life without that education, especially compared with what she learned in school, which she described as “nothing memorable.”

Oklahoma sets few requirements for sex education. The only mandated subject is AIDS prevention instruction. Other decisions are left to school districts, which may choose whether to teach sex education. If a district does, its superintendent must approve the curriculum, which must include information on consent and abstinence. Parents can review the curriculum and opt their children out. The source reports that this leaves young people with unequal access depending on where they attend school, and that some Oklahoma legislators want to limit that access further.

For some local churches, the source says, providing comprehensive sex education is a matter of faith, and they are working to fill some of the gaps. At All Souls, the program uses Our Whole Lives, known as OWL. The curriculum provides lessons for kindergarten through grade 12 on topics such as relationships, gender identity, sexual orientation and health. The Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ developed it, and professional sexuality educators wrote it. In October, students met in a room at the end of a hallway in the church. Coordinators Kalyn McKenzie-Scoggins and Amanda Stewart read questions that students had left anonymously at the end of the previous week’s class. A criminal defense attorney, Jill Web, also visited to speak about state laws and penalties related to consent and pornography, a subject the source notes is not required in schools.

Parents attend a meeting before enrolling their children and receive an outline of the curriculum. They also get handouts with suggested questions to help them start conversations at home, which the church says keeps parents as the primary educators of their children. All Souls divides its classes into three groups: kindergarten and first grade, fourth through sixth grade, and seventh through ninth grade. Shannon Boston, the church’s executive director of lifespan religious education, said the youngest class learns about bodily autonomy and consent, the middle class covers puberty and self-acceptance, and the oldest class explores individual values in depth.

Boston said each OWL class creates its own covenant for behavior, and that the church-wide covenant is “to dwell together in peace, to be peaceful, to seek the truth, in love, and to help one another.” The coordinators said their October sessions covered consent, healthy sexual relationships and abstinence, topics they tied to the church’s ideal of respecting oneself and others. They help students talk through their feelings so they can reach their own conclusions. “We really want to teach you how to think,” McKenzie-Scoggins said, “so that you make the best choices for you.” Stewart said the aim is for students “to be safe and be making educated choices” about their bodies.

Starr said the awkward atmosphere and giggling often associated with sex education was absent from OWL, which she described as a safe place to ask questions without judgment. She said the lesson that stayed with her most was how the classes addressed sexuality. “I identify as bisexual, and the first place I ever learned about a dental dam was in this class,” she said. “They were just very open about sex education and sexual safety and health for all sexualities.”

Source: Read the original report