Nunavik health board revamps sex-ed courses

This image of a couple was produced for Nunavik’s sex ed program. (ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF JENNIFER LAPAGE)

What happened to sexual education in Nunavik’s secondary classrooms?

Students may notice a lull in the program while the region’s public health department and the Kativik School Board try to agree on appropriate teaching material.

While “sex ed” isn’t officially a part of the KSB’s curriculum, a six to eight week program developed through Nunavik’s public health department has been available since 2007.

But school board officials now say the material needs to be re-assessed and re-adapted to better suit its audience of Secondary One and Two students, usually known as Grade Seven and Grade Eight in most other jurisdictions.

The program hasn’t been consistent because of staffing and scheduling problems and its heavy focus on sexually transmitted infections rather than on healthy relationships, the KSB told Nunatsiaq News.

The school board says the material should be more “culturally appropriate,” although they would not specify how.

The statement provided to the newspaper adds that “girls who were sexually molested couldn’t deal with the program material in a classroom situation.”

But sexual health nurse Faye Le Gresley says the material was based on local input.

“It’s culturally adapted and the tools relate to the reality here,” she said.

The program is offered as a package to schools – most often to student counsellors, she said.

It’s left up to them to decide how to teach the program, which deals with issues like reproduction, anatomy and STIs.

But only half the region’s school actually gave the program during its first two years — and even fewer last year.

Now the program is being revised and translated into Inuttitut, with an expected relaunch in the fall of 2011.

But its delivery in Nunavik’s school will likely be conditional on the KSB’s approval of the revised teaching material.

The school board says some material from the original sex ed program was well received in small groups or in one-on-one situation, although it did not say why this was so.

Its education services department is currently looking into finding second-language teachers to teach the course, the KSB said.

In the meantime, Pauktuutit and other northern regions have requested permission to use the same program, Le Gresley said.

“It’s not perfect, but any process is ongoing,” Le Gresley said. “Our long-term goal is to see sex-ed integrated into the curriculum.”