Condoms In Schools

Toulmin Schema

Initial Enthymeme: Local school districts should start by supporting the passing out of condoms in high schools to prevent the transmission of STD’s because the school board has the responsibility to educate and protect our students on the dangers of STD’s as well as the other imminent dangers they already have procedures in place for.

Claim: Local school districts should start by supporting the passing out of condoms in high schools to prevent the transmission of STD’s

Stated Reason: because the school board has the responsibility to educate and protect our students on the dangers of STD’s as well as the other imminent dangers they already have procedures in place for.

Warrant: The transmission of STD’s and the numbers of young adults with them would decrease with the implementation of condom availability programs.

Condom Availability Programs In High Schools

I. Introduction- Local school districts should start by supporting the passing out of condoms in high schools to prevent the transmission of STD’s

A. School boards have the responsibility to educate

B. School boards have the responsibility to protect our students

II. Composition of the school board

A. Duties of the school board

B. Decisions on which classes and in what capacity they should be taught

C. Misinformation in sex education classes

III. Cost of the programs

A. Employment of students

B. Funding by federal government

IV. Opposing side

A. Promotion of sex in schools

B. Condom availability programs are “value-less”

V. Conclusion

Condom Availability Programs In High Schools

“Thou shalt not” and “just say no” have never been successful in preventing people of any age from sexual activity, let alone teenagers. Teenage sex is by far not a new phenomenon. There used to be more “shotgun” weddings and marital misery and less single mothers living in poverty, but underage sex has been thriving for centuries. Over the last 20 years or so, the growing problem of sexually transmitted diseases has become enormous. With the onset of such a major problem that continues to plague our society it is imperative that as a community and as a society that we begin to educate and support our teens with resources to decrease the problem.

People can sit around crying over the morality of this situation until the cows come home but the fact still remains that as long we have advertising programs that are selling sexiness as if it equals attractiveness people are going to be thinking with their hormones more than with their brains. As much as most parents would love to dispute this fact it also includes their teenagers. Through unprotected sexual intercourse large numbers of U.S. adolescents are exposed to HIV or become infected with other sexually transmitted diseases. (Kirby) All of this means that if we want to curb the STD epidemic then we are going to need to use every tool that we have available to us. All of us have been teens once and we all know how hard it is to think when your hormones are ranting and dancing, your pulse is thundering like a herd of buffalo and your knees are getting weak to hold your body up off the ground. Why shouldn’t our school boards step up and take some responsibility and make it easier for these kids to get the protection that they need so that when this situation occurs they can be properly prepared for it?

Past the simple fact that “just say no” does not work when we are talking about trying to outshout our raging hormones, everywhere you turn there is something sexually oriented. In the supermarket we have sex-oriented content of magazines, a lot of the time these are at the checkout stands, the sex-oriented content of advertising, the sex-oriented content of TV and movies. With these images everywhere we turn, hitting our teens in the face around every corner, isn’t it our local school board’s responsibility to make condoms available to high school students, with no strings attached. All the while they should be stepping up the educational programs and the national government should be stepping down the sex-oriented nature of magazines, TV shows, movies, and advertising. All of this would be in the hopes that we will be decreasing the need for the condoms in the first place. If schools and organizations continue to refrain from supporting our society and providing education and resources to help combat this problem, then who will? The media has a great influence on what we do and how we do it. School boards should be held responsible for making sure that the correct information is available in order to decrease the staggering numbers of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

In schools today, school boards have policies and procedures in place that protect our children from very imminent dangers, tornadoes, fires, even pedophiles, yet they seem to think that it is not their responsibility to help protect them from the dangers of STD’s. Surely we should also be protecting them from STD’s because many of them have disastrous effects many years later. The condoms could be distributed by school personnel such as nurses, counselors, faculty members and perhaps vending machines located in the bathrooms. (Family Planning Perspectives 1993) Local school districts should start by supporting the passing out of condoms in high schools to prevent the transmission of STD’s because the school board has the responsibility to educate and protect our students on the dangers of STD’s as well as the other imminent dangers they already have procedures in place for.

School boards are made up of local citizens, many of them parents, and not educators. This school board determines policy, hires the teachers and has the final say on the expenses in that district. Schools are well suited to educate our youth, particularly about topic areas such as sexuality in which different concepts should be taught during developmental