School Hopes to Cut Student Pregnancy Rate : Sex Education Program Looks at the Whys, What-Ifs

Driving into San Marcos from San Diego is like taking a wrong turn in Surf City and ending up in the Land of Oz. You leave the multi-laned madness of Interstate 5 and travel a two-lane road, past flower fields, fruit stands and through an occasional traffic light.

Barely 40 miles north of the state’s second-largest city, this meadowed community of 15,000 remained an obscure pocket of San Diego County until last year, when its high school became a national example of teen-age sexuality in practice.

Last March, counselors at San Marcos High School reported that 150 of the school’s 692 girls--about one of every five--became pregnant in the 1983-84 school year. The figure--based on pregnancies reported to counselors by students--shocked parents, embarrassed female students and sent school officials scrambling for solutions.

Since then, other high schools across the nation have revealed similar or higher pregnancy rates, confirming statements by San Marcos school officials that their students are not unusual.

High schools in Chicago, Dallas, New York City and San Francisco have established family-planning clinics on campus to discourage student pregnancies. At DuSable High School in Chicago, a clinic was set up after officials reported that one of every three girls at the school became pregnant in 1984.

“The only thing unusual about us is that we came out and admitted it first,” San Marcos High School Principal Wes Walsvick said. “It appears we’re not abnormally out of line, but that doesn’t make me feel any better.”

Two months after the teen-age pregnancy report was released, the San Marcos school board instituted a mandatory, three-tiered course of study for ninth-graders. For the first time, it incorporated the emotional and physical aspects of sex education.

The major curriculum change involved the inclusion of sex education in a course called “Decision Making.” Instead of teaching the hows of sex, the class focuses on the whys and what-ifs.

“We did our homework, and found we were covering the mechanics (of sex) in science classes,” said Monica Weatherholt, who teaches the class. “But somewhere along the line, we lost sight of what we’re really trying to do. We’re treating them like students, and not preparing them for life.

“Sex education is more than mechanics. It’s human responsibility, as well.”

To go with the new curriculum, two textbooks by Mindy Bingham--”Choices” for girls and “Challenges” for boys--are assigned to students. The thick workbooks include fictitious, first-person accounts of unplanned pregnancies and early marriages, followed by essay questions for students.

The goal, Weatherholt said, is to make students think twice about doing things that might have long-reaching, negative consequences. The class includes sections on drugs, careers and other issues facing students, but Weatherholt said the big difference from other similar classes is that it allows teachers to discuss issues of sex that were previously off limits.

“It’s like an entire generation of kids got (the physical) part of the story, but they didn’t get the responsibility part of sex,” Weatherholt said. “They looked at the cover but didn’t open the book.”

The physical side of sex is covered in a biology course taught by two instructors working together, Rick Ashby and John Morrello.

“It used to be I’d have a big box in front of class, and anyone with a question about sex could drop it in and not be embarrassed,” Morrello said with a laugh. “But now, when it comes to the reproductive system, we go into as much depth and detail as possible.”

Rather than being a “how-to” class, Morrello emphasizes that he and Ashby try to give students scientific knowledge to erase misconceptions that often lead to teen pregnancies--that girls can’t get pregnant the first time, for example.

The other part of students’ sex education includes a class entitled “Health and Safety,” aimed at improving students’ self-esteem. Areas of study include dating, stages of love, the sex drive, and engagements and marriage.

The updated curriculum wasn’t approved without some controversy. Orange County psychiatrist Melvin Anchell warned San Marcos parents that sex education develops perverts and nymphomaniacs and causes more pregnancies and venereal disease.

Walsvick said a couple of parents wrote letters asking that their children be excused from the portions of class dealing with sex.

For the most part, however, he said the curriculum has caused less fuss than the publicity about the pregnancy rate, which made San Marcos’s high school girls easy targets for derogatory comments.

“The students weathered it well for about four months. Then, they’d just about had it up to here,” said Walsvick, who called CBS and ABC at one point and persuaded them to cancel plans for television coverage at the school.

Brian Cole, a senior at the high school, said the feeling was that San Marcos was being made a scapegoat for a problem common throughout the nation’s schools.

“It’s not just confined to San Marcos. San Marcos just let everyone know about it,” he said.

At the same time, however, Cole and other students say amusement was the general reaction on campus.

“Everyone joked about it,” said Brian Kohls, 16. “The other schools laughed about the San Marcos girls being ‘loose,’ but it also gave the San Marcos guys a kind of studly reputation.”