The Healthy Teens Campaign is a broad-based coalition [1] made up of education, public health, and faith-based organizations that seek to improve the health and safety of Florida teens through comprehensive sex education. The Healthy Teens Campaign supports The Healthy Teens Act [2], which will require that Florida public schools receiving state funding provide comprehensive, medically-accurate, and age-appropriate factual information when teaching about sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS, family planning, or pregnancy.

Why The Healthy Teens Campaign?

Florida currently has no statewide standards for teaching sex education. A recent University of Florida study identified the following inadequacies in sex education in Florida:

• Sex education is rarely afforded an effective amount of time.
• It occurs too late in students’ academic careers (usually in 9th or 10th grade).
• There is little uniformity or standards (in terms of training or quality assurance).
• Sex education is not accessible to all students (especially Latinos).
• It fails to adequately address students’ needs.