The Ontario government’s revised sex-education curriculum for elementary schools includes instruction on health, cyber safety and consent.
It also requires school boards to allow parents to exempt their children from certain teachings they don’t agree with.
The curriculum is available online, and includes addressing issues related to mental health, head concussions, vaping and cannabis, cyber safety, healthy eating and body image, and healthy relationships issues, including sexually related consent.
In a press release yesterday, Stephen Lecce said “this modernization will keep kids safe in and outside of the classroom”
Lecce said the revamped curriculum does not include many of the elements of a 2015 sex-education curriculum version that the Ontario government criticized as ideological and of which eventually scrapped when the current government came into power.
Lecce has also said that he’s open to new ideas from the various school boards and teacher unions across the province to help cap class sizes from rising to 28 over the next four years as the Ontario government tries to find $250 million in cost savings.
The new curriculum is meant to replace the controversial teaching plan brought in after the PCs took power last year.
One main feature is that is requires school boards to allow parents to exempt their children from teachings on human development and sexual health if they so choose.
When they were in Opposition party status, the Tories largely stayed away from naming specific concepts in the curriculum that they didn’t agree with.
Protest movements led by social-conservatives did however identify gender-identity, masturbation and all references to anal intercourse as being unacceptable to young children.
I’d like to give an unexpected shout out to Ontario PC party for maintaining the updated sex ed program with minimal changes. Finally using their heads. Another policy in a long line to do a 180.
— Uppal (@Cuppal1) August 21, 2019
In the new elementary curriculum, sexual orientation will be taught in the 5th Grade which is a grade earlier than in the previous Liberal governments 2015 curriculum. Their government had the topic being taught in Grade 6.
Gender identity will be a mandatory topic in Grade 8 compared to the previously mandatory teaching in Grade 6.
The new curriculum will also focus on mental health, teachings on concussions and the risks of vaping, and expanded lessons on consent, cannabis risks and online safety.
“This is a transformed and updated, modernized curriculum with a central focus on safety, with great respect, in process and in substance, this is a dramatically better product.”
