MANHATTAN — More than 40 percent of the city’s middle and high school students are not getting the sex education required by the state, according to a report released on Thursday by New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer.
The findings come as the rate of sexually transmitted infections among city teenagers is slightly rising, especially in the city's poorest neighborhoods. Previously, the rates had been in decline for four years, according to the city's Health Department.
For those students in the 13 to 19 age range in New York City, the rate of gonorrhea infection in 2015 rose to 350 cases per 100,000, up from 315 cases per 100,000 in 2014. The infection rate of chlamydia among the same age bracket was 2,195 cases per 100,000 in 2015, which was also a slight increase from the year before.
Brooklyn alone had the sixth highest number of reported cases of chlamydia nationwide, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
More than 11 percent of teens reported sexual dating violence during the past 12 months, according to a 2015 survey of high school students from the Mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence. And while teen pregnancy rates have dropped overall in recent years, they remain high in parts of the city such as The Bronx where in 2014 there were 69 pregnancies per 1,000 girls between the ages of 15 to 19, the report noted.
“DOE is not fulfilling its own mandate that sex ed be taught in secondary schools grades six through twelve — a failure that is most acute in middle schools,” the report stated. “The result is, our students are missing out on critical curriculum, from understanding gender identity, to discussing options for contraception and resources for LGBTQ youth."
Stringer found that 43 percent of middle school students did not receive their state mandated semester of health education, which includes sex ed.
Only 7.6 percent of health instructors received any professional development related to sexual education over the past two years, the report found. Meanwhile, 92 percent of middle schools and 53 percent of high schools have no teacher licensed by the city for health education.
The Department of Education will soon be announcing a Sex Education Task Force to address challenges of implementing sex ed, school officials said.
City Council passed legislation in May to create such a task force to review current sexual health education curricula and then issue a report by December with recommendations on how to improve sex ed.
“We are committed to providing all students with a comprehensive health education that includes medically accurate and age-appropriate lessons on sexual health,” DOE spokeswoman Toya Holness said in a statement.
