Nunavik school board launches Grade 5 sex ed course

Grade 5 students across Nunavik begin sexual education this year, a program the KSB plans to gradually expand to older grades. (FILE PHOTO)

KUUJJUAQ — A paper activity booklet opens to a figure of the human body, with room to name its parts.

Flip through to another page, where illustrations explain proper cleaning and bathing techniques.

This may seem like basic knowledge, but these lessons make up the new sexual education curriculum that the Kativik School Board has just launched in Nunavik classrooms.

Up until now, sexual education has not been an official part of the region’s curriculum, instead taught informally by public health nurses as part of a regional health board initiative.

“The council of commissioners requested that a course be offered involving a sexual education component,” said Daniel Lafleur, assistant director of second language curriculum at the KSB, “but they didn’t know what it would look like.”

As it has taken shape, the new program is called Personal Life and Social Skills, the curriculum has come to focus on “life skills” — interpersonal relationships, emotional and social learning as well as sexual health — by exploring human anatomy.

It’s being delivered this year to Grade 5 students in English, French and Inuktitut.

Introducing the program at that grade level means students will be taught the curriculum by their home room teacher, Lafleur explained, allowing the teacher to adapt the curriculum to the class’s needs.

Aimed at students aged 11 and 12, the programming is not explicitly sexual in nature.

As the program advances into Grade 6 and beyond — according to the KSB’s plan — the curriculum will look more deeply at issues such as self-discovery, sexually-transmitted infections, contraception, and sexual abuse, using Nunavik’s Good Touch, Bad Touch program.

“This course is like an extension of physical education,” Lafleur said. “We looked at the reality of Nunavik, at the statistics, to see what’s going on.”

Those statistics would reveal some of the highest-documented rates for sexually-transmitted infections in Quebec such as chlamydia and gonorrhea, with most of those cases affecting Nunavimmiut aged 15 to 29.

Others statistics show the average age of Nunavimmiut mothers is about five years younger than elsewhere in Quebec; teenage pregnancies are also about 12 times more common in Nunavik than in Quebec overall.

The program is not specifically based on the Quebec curriculum but launches as the provincial governments in both Quebec and Ontario introduce their own new sexual health curriculum.

Programs in both provinces have been considered controversial.

But Lafleur said the school board hasn’t heard much negative feedback in Nunavik.

“We’re just starting, so we haven’t heard much yet,” he said.

“The material has been well-received by the teachers so far. They feel it’s a need.”